Feature Enhancement Network: A Refined Scene Text Detector

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a refined scene text detector with a \textit{novel} Feature Enhancement Network (FEN) for Region Proposal and Text Detection Refinement. Retrospectively, both region proposal with \textit{only} $3\times 3$ sliding-window feature and text detection refinement with \textit{single scale} high level feature are insufficient, especially for smaller scene text. Therefore, we design a new FEN network with \textit{task-specific}, \textit{low} and \textit{high} level semantic features fusion to improve the performance of text detection. Besides, since \textit{unitary} position-sensitive RoI pooling in general object detection is unreasonable for variable text regions, an \textit{adaptively weighted} position-sensitive RoI pooling layer is devised for further enhancing the detecting accuracy. To tackle the \textit{sample-imbalance} problem during the refinement stage, we also propose an effective \textit{positives mining} strategy for efficiently training our network. Experiments on ICDAR 2011 and 2013 robust text detection benchmarks demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art results, outperforming all reported methods in terms of F-measure.