CPN: Complementary Proposal Network for Unconstrained Text Detection

Abstract: Existing methods for scene text detection can be divided into two paradigms: segmentation-based and anchor-based. While Segmentation-based methods are well-suited for irregular shapes, they struggle with compact or overlapping layouts. Conversely, anchor-based approaches excel for complex layouts but suffer from irregular shapes. To strengthen their merits and overcome their respective demerits, we propose a Complementary Proposal Network (CPN) that seamlessly and parallelly integrates semantic and geometric information for superior performance. The CPN comprises two efficient networks for proposal generation: the Deformable Morphology Semantic Network, which generates semantic proposals employing an innovative deformable morphological operator, and the Balanced Region Proposal Network, which produces geometric proposals with pre-defined anchors. To further enhance the complementarity, we introduce an Interleaved Feature Attention module that enables semantic and geometric features to interact deeply before proposal generation. By leveraging both complementary proposals and features, CPN outperforms state-of-the-art approaches with significant margins under comparable computation cost. Specifically, our approach achieves improvements of 3.6%, 1.3% and 1.0% on challenging benchmarks ICDAR19-ArT, IC15, and MSRA-TD500, respectively. Code for our method will be released.