Object Proposals for Text Extraction in the Wild

Object Proposals is a recent computer vision technique receiving increasing interest from the research community. Its main objective is to generate a relatively small set of bounding box proposals that are most likely to contain objects of interest. The use of Object Proposals techniques in the scene text understanding field is innovative. Motivated by the success of powerful while expensive techniques to recognize words in a holistic way, Object Proposals techniques emerge as an alternative to the traditional text detectors. In this paper we study to what extent the existing generic Object Proposals methods may be useful for scene text understanding. Also, we propose a new Object Proposals algorithm that is specifically designed for text and compare it with other generic methods in the state of the art. Experiments show that our proposal is superior in its ability of producing good quality word proposals in an efficient way. The source code of our method is made publicly available.Comment: 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2015

DeepProposals: Hunting Objects and Actions by Cascading Deep Convolutional Layers

In this paper, a new method for generating object and action proposals in images and videos is proposed. It builds on activations of different convolutional layers of a pretrained CNN, combining the localization accuracy of the early layers with the high informative-ness (and hence recall) of the later layers. To this end, we build an inverse cascade that, going backward from the later to the earlier convolutional layers of the CNN, selects the most promising locations and refines them in a coarse-to-fine manner. The method is efficient, because i) it re-uses the same features extracted for detection, ii) it aggregates features using integral images, and iii) it avoids a dense evaluation of the proposals thanks to the use of the inverse coarse-to-fine cascade. The method is also accurate. We show that our DeepProposals outperform most of the previously proposed object proposal and action proposal approaches and, when plugged into a CNN-based object detector, produce state-of-the-art detection performance.Comment: 15 page