TextBlockV2: Towards Precise-Detection-Free Scene Text Spotting with Pre-trained Language Model

Existing scene text spotters are designed to locate and transcribe texts from images. However, it is challenging for a spotter to achieve precise detection and recognition of scene texts simultaneously. Inspired by the glimpse-focus spotting pipeline of human beings and impressive performances of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) on visual tasks, we ask: 1) "Can machines spot texts without precise detection just like human beings?", and if yes, 2) "Is text block another alternative for scene text spotting other than word or character?" To this end, our proposed scene text spotter leverages advanced PLMs to enhance performance without fine-grained detection. Specifically, we first use a simple detector for block-level text detection to obtain rough positional information. Then, we finetune a PLM using a large-scale OCR dataset to achieve accurate recognition. Benefiting from the comprehensive language knowledge gained during the pre-training phase, the PLM-based recognition module effectively handles complex scenarios, including multi-line, reversed, occluded, and incomplete-detection texts. Taking advantage of the fine-tuned language model on scene recognition benchmarks and the paradigm of text block detection, extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our scene text spotter across multiple public benchmarks. Additionally, we attempt to spot texts directly from an entire scene image to demonstrate the potential of PLMs, even Large Language Models (LLMs).

Low-light Stereo Image Enhancement and De-noising in the Low-frequency Information Enhanced Image Space

Unlike single image task, stereo image enhancement can use another view information, and its key stage is how to perform cross-view feature interaction to extract useful information from another view. However, complex noise in low-light image and its impact on subsequent feature encoding and interaction are ignored by the existing methods. In this paper, a method is proposed to perform enhancement and de-noising simultaneously. First, to reduce unwanted noise interference, a low-frequency information enhanced module (IEM) is proposed to suppress noise and produce a new image space. Additionally, a cross-channel and spatial context information mining module (CSM) is proposed to encode long-range spatial dependencies and to enhance inter-channel feature interaction. Relying on CSM, an encoder-decoder structure is constructed, incorporating cross-view and cross-scale feature interactions to perform enhancement in the new image space. Finally, the network is trained with the constraints of both spatial and frequency domain losses. Extensive experiments on both synthesized and real datasets show that our method obtains better detail recovery and noise removal compared with state-of-the-art methods. In addition, a real stereo image enhancement dataset is captured with stereo camera ZED2. The code and dataset are publicly available at: https://www.github.com/noportraits/LFENet.