Bridging Synthetic and Real Worlds for Pre-training Scene Text Detectors

Existing scene text detection methods typically rely on extensive real data for training. Due to the lack of annotated real images, recent works have attempted to exploit large-scale labeled synthetic data (LSD) for pre-training text detectors. However, a synth-to-real domain gap emerges, further limiting the performance of text detectors. Differently, in this work, we propose \textbf{FreeReal}, a real-domain-aligned pre-training paradigm that enables the complementary strengths of both LSD and unlabeled real data (URD). Specifically, to bridge real and synthetic worlds for pre-training, a novel glyph-based mixing mechanism (GlyphMix) is tailored for text images. GlyphMix delineates the character structures of synthetic images and embeds them as graffiti-like units onto real images. Without introducing real domain drift, GlyphMix freely yields real-world images with annotations derived from synthetic labels. Furthermore, when given free fine-grained synthetic labels, GlyphMix can effectively bridge the linguistic domain gap stemming from English-dominated LSD to URD in various languages. Without bells and whistles, FreeReal achieves average gains of 4.56\%, 3.85\%, 3.90\%, and 1.97\% in improving the performance of DBNet, PANet, PSENet, and FCENet methods, respectively, consistently outperforming previous pre-training methods by a substantial margin across four public datasets. Code will be released soon.

Self-supervised Character-to-Character Distillation

Handling complicated text images (e.g., irregular structures, low resolution, heavy occlusion, and even illumination), existing supervised text recognition methods are data-hungry. Although these methods employ large-scale synthetic text images to reduce the dependence on annotated real images, the domain gap limits the recognition performance. Therefore, exploring the robust text feature representation on unlabeled real images by self-supervised learning is a good solution. However, existing self-supervised text recognition methods only execute sequence-to-sequence representation learning by roughly splitting the visual features along the horizontal axis, which will damage the character structures. Besides, these sequential-level self-learning methods limit the availability of geometric-based data augmentation, as large-scale geometry augmentation leads to sequence-to-sequence inconsistency. To address the above-mentioned issues, we proposed a novel self-supervised character-to-character distillation method, CCD. Specifically, we delineate the character structures of unlabeled real images by designing a self-supervised character segmentation module, and further apply the segmentation results to build character-level representation learning. CCD differs from prior works in that we propose a character-level pretext task to learn more fine-grained feature representations. Besides, compared with the inflexible augmentations of sequence-to-sequence models, our work satisfies character-to-character representation consistency, across various transformations (e.g., geometry and colour), to generate robust text features in the representative space. Experiments demonstrate that CCD achieves state-of-the-art performance on publicly available text recognition benchmarks.

A Glyph-driven Topology Enhancement Network for Scene Text Recognition

Attention-based methods by establishing one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) mechanisms with an encoder-decoder framework have dominated scene text recognition (STR) tasks due to their capabilities of building implicit language representations. However, 1D attention-based mechanisms suffer from alignment drift on latter characters. 2D attention-based mechanisms only roughly focus on the spatial regions of characters without excavating detailed topological structures, which reduces the visual performance. To mitigate the above issues, we propose a novel Glyph-driven Topology Enhancement Network (GTEN) to improve topological features representations in visual models for STR. Specifically, an unsupervised method is first employed to exploit 1D sequence-aligned attention weights. Second, we construct a supervised segmentation module to capture 2D ordered and pixel-wise topological information of glyphs without extra character-level annotations. Third, these resulting outputs fuse enhanced topological features to enrich semantic feature representations for STR. Experiments demonstrate that GTEN achieves competitive performance on IIIT5K-Words, Street View Text, ICDAR-series, SVT Perspective, and CUTE80 datasets.

Industrial Scene Text Detection with Refined Feature-attentive Network

Detecting the marking characters of industrial metal parts remains challenging due to low visual contrast, uneven illumination, corroded character structures, and cluttered background of metal part images. Affected by these factors, bounding boxes generated by most existing methods locate low-contrast text areas inaccurately. In this paper, we propose a refined feature-attentive network (RFN) to solve the inaccurate localization problem. Specifically, we design a parallel feature integration mechanism to construct an adaptive feature representation from multi-resolution features, which enhances the perception of multi-scale texts at each scale-specific level to generate a high-quality attention map. Then, an attentive refinement network is developed by the attention map to rectify the location deviation of candidate boxes. In addition, a re-scoring mechanism is designed to select text boxes with the best rectified location. Moreover, we construct two industrial scene text datasets, including a total of 102156 images and 1948809 text instances with various character structures and metal parts. Extensive experiments on our dataset and four public datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.