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

Pseudo-goldstino and electroweakinos via VBF processes at LHC

The multi-sector SUSY breaking predicts pseudo-goldstino which can couple to the visible sector more strongly than the ordinary gavitino and thus induce the decays of the lightest neutralino and chargino (collectively called electroweakinos) inside the detector. In this note we study the electroweakino pair productions via vector boson fusion (VBF) processes followed by decays to pseudo-goldstino at the LHC. Our Monte Carlo simulations show that at the 14 TeV LHC with 3000 fb^{-1} luminosity the dominant production channel pp->chargino+neutralino+2 jets can have a statistical significance above 2-sigma while other production channels are not accessible.Comment: Version in JHEP (comments added