Character proposal network for robust text extraction

Abstract

Maximally stable extremal regions (MSER), which is a popular method to generate character proposals/candidates, has shown superior performance in scene text detection. However, the pixel-level operation limits its capability for handling some challenging cases (e.g., multiple connected characters, separated parts of one character and non-uniform illumination). To better tackle these cases, we design a character proposal network (CPN) by taking advantage of the high capacity and fast computing of fully convolutional network (FCN). Specifically, the network simultaneously predicts character-ness scores and refines the corresponding locations. The character-ness scores can be used for proposal ranking to reject non-character proposals and the refining process aims to obtain the more accurate locations. Furthermore, considering the situation that different characters have different aspect ratios, we propose a multi-template strategy, designing a refiner for each aspect ratio. The extensive experiments indicate our method achieves recall rates of 93.88%, 93.60% and 96.46% on ICDAR 2013, SVT and Chinese 2k datasets respectively using less than 1000 proposals, demonstrating promising performance of our character proposal network.