Towards Robust Curve Text Detection with Conditional Spatial Expansion

It is challenging to detect curve texts due to their irregular shapes and varying sizes. In this paper, we first investigate the deficiency of the existing curve detection methods and then propose a novel Conditional Spatial Expansion (CSE) mechanism to improve the performance of curve text detection. Instead of regarding the curve text detection as a polygon regression or a segmentation problem, we treat it as a region expansion process. Our CSE starts with a seed arbitrarily initialized within a text region and progressively merges neighborhood regions based on the extracted local features by a CNN and contextual information of merged regions. The CSE is highly parameterized and can be seamlessly integrated into existing object detection frameworks. Enhanced by the data-dependent CSE mechanism, our curve text detection system provides robust instance-level text region extraction with minimal post-processing. The analysis experiment shows that our CSE can handle texts with various shapes, sizes, and orientations, and can effectively suppress the false-positives coming from text-like textures or unexpected texts included in the same RoI. Compared with the existing curve text detection algorithms, our method is more robust and enjoys a simpler processing flow. It also creates a new state-of-art performance on curve text benchmarks with F-score of up to 78.4$\%$.Comment: This paper has been accepted by IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2019

A DCNN-based Arbitrarily-Oriented Object Detector for Quality Control and Inspection Application

Following the success of machine vision systems for on-line automated quality control and inspection processes, an object recognition solution is presented in this work for two different specific applications, i.e., the detection of quality control items in surgery toolboxes prepared for sterilizing in a hospital, as well as the detection of defects in vessel hulls to prevent potential structural failures. The solution has two stages. First, a feature pyramid architecture based on Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) is used to improve the detection performance, and a statistical analysis based on ground truth is employed to select parameters of a range of default boxes. Second, a lightweight neural network is exploited to achieve oriented detection results using a regression method. The first stage of the proposed method is capable of detecting the small targets considered in the two scenarios. In the second stage, despite the simplicity, it is efficient to detect elongated targets while maintaining high running efficiency