DPTNet: A Dual-Path Transformer Architecture for Scene Text Detection

The prosperity of deep learning contributes to the rapid progress in scene text detection. Among all the methods with convolutional networks, segmentation-based ones have drawn extensive attention due to their superiority in detecting text instances of arbitrary shapes and extreme aspect ratios. However, the bottom-up methods are limited to the performance of their segmentation models. In this paper, we propose DPTNet (Dual-Path Transformer Network), a simple yet effective architecture to model the global and local information for the scene text detection task. We further propose a parallel design that integrates the convolutional network with a powerful self-attention mechanism to provide complementary clues between the attention path and convolutional path. Moreover, a bi-directional interaction module across the two paths is developed to provide complementary clues in the channel and spatial dimensions. We also upgrade the concentration operation by adding an extra multi-head attention layer to it. Our DPTNet achieves state-of-the-art results on the MSRA-TD500 dataset, and provides competitive results on other standard benchmarks in terms of both detection accuracy and speed.

AdaDNNs: Adaptive Ensemble of Deep Neural Networks for Scene Text Recognition

Recognizing text in the wild is a really challenging task because of complex backgrounds, various illuminations and diverse distortions, even with deep neural networks (convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks). In the end-to-end training procedure for scene text recognition, the outputs of deep neural networks at different iterations are always demonstrated with diversity and complementarity for the target object (text). Here, a simple but effective deep learning method, an adaptive ensemble of deep neural networks (AdaDNNs), is proposed to simply select and adaptively combine classifier components at different iterations from the whole learning system. Furthermore, the ensemble is formulated as a Bayesian framework for classifier weighting and combination. A variety of experiments on several typical acknowledged benchmarks, i.e., ICDAR Robust Reading Competition (Challenge 1, 2 and 4) datasets, verify the surprised improvement from the baseline DNNs, and the effectiveness of AdaDNNs compared with the recent state-of-the-art methods.

Motion-Appearance Interactive Encoding for Object Segmentation in Unconstrained Videos

We present a novel method of integrating motion and appearance cues for foreground object segmentation in unconstrained videos. Unlike conventional methods encoding motion and appearance patterns individually, our method puts particular emphasis on their mutual assistance. Specifically, we propose using an interactively constrained encoding (ICE) scheme to incorporate motion and appearance patterns into a graph that leads to a spatiotemporal energy optimization. The reason of utilizing ICE is that both motion and appearance cues for the same target share underlying correlative structure, thus can be exploited in a deeply collaborative manner. We perform ICE not only in the initialization but also in the refinement stage of a two-layer framework for object segmentation. This scheme allows our method to consistently capture structural patterns about object perceptions throughout the whole framework. Our method can be operated on superpixels instead of raw pixels to reduce the number of graph nodes by two orders of magnitude. Moreover, we propose to partially explore the multi-object localization problem with inter-occlusion by weighted bipartite graph matching. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (i.e., SegTrack, MOViCS, and GaTech) demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared with extensive state-of-the-art methods.