PixelLink: Detecting Scene Text via Instance Segmentation

Understand

Most state-of-the-art scene text detection algorithms are deep learning based methods that depend on bounding box regression and perform at least two kinds of predictions: text/non-text classification and location regression.

• Regression plays a key role in the acquisition of bounding boxes in these methods, but it is not indispensable because text/non-text prediction can also be considered as a kind of semantic segmentation that contains full location information in itself.
• However, text instances in scene images often lie very close to each other, making them very difficult to separate via semantic segmentation.
• Therefore, instance segmentation is needed to address this problem.