SRFormer: Empowering Regression-Based Text Detection Transformer with Segmentation

Existing techniques for text detection can be broadly classified into two primary groups: segmentation-based methods and regression-based methods. Segmentation models offer enhanced robustness to font variations but require intricate post-processing, leading to high computational overhead. Regression-based methods undertake instance-aware prediction but face limitations in robustness and data efficiency due to their reliance on high-level representations. In our academic pursuit, we propose SRFormer, a unified DETR-based model with amalgamated Segmentation and Regression, aiming at the synergistic harnessing of the inherent robustness in segmentation representations, along with the straightforward post-processing of instance-level regression. Our empirical analysis indicates that favorable segmentation predictions can be obtained at the initial decoder layers. In light of this, we constrain the incorporation of segmentation branches to the first few decoder layers and employ progressive regression refinement in subsequent layers, achieving performance gains while minimizing additional computational load from the mask. Furthermore, we propose a Mask-informed Query Enhancement module. We take the segmentation result as a natural soft-ROI to pool and extract robust pixel representations, which are then employed to enhance and diversify instance queries. Extensive experimentation across multiple benchmarks has yielded compelling findings, highlighting our method's exceptional robustness, superior training and data efficiency, as well as its state-of-the-art performance

On Recognizing Texts of Arbitrary Shapes with 2D Self-Attention

Scene text recognition (STR) is the task of recognizing character sequences in natural scenes. While there have been great advances in STR methods, current methods still fail to recognize texts in arbitrary shapes, such as heavily curved or rotated texts, which are abundant in daily life (e.g. restaurant signs, product labels, company logos, etc). This paper introduces a novel architecture to recognizing texts of arbitrary shapes, named Self-Attention Text Recognition Network (SATRN), which is inspired by the Transformer. SATRN utilizes the self-attention mechanism to describe two-dimensional (2D) spatial dependencies of characters in a scene text image. Exploiting the full-graph propagation of self-attention, SATRN can recognize texts with arbitrary arrangements and large inter-character spacing. As a result, SATRN outperforms existing STR models by a large margin of 5.7 pp on average in "irregular text" benchmarks. We provide empirical analyses that illustrate the inner mechanisms and the extent to which the model is applicable (e.g. rotated and multi-line text). We will open-source the code