Infrared (IR) wavelength is out of visible range and thus usually cut by hot filters in general commercial cameras. However, some information from the near-IR (NIR) range is known to improve the overall visibility of scene in many cases. For example when there is fog or haze in the scene, NIR image has clearer visibility than visible image because of its stronger penetration property. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for fusing the RGB and NIR images to obtain the enhanced images of the outdoor scenes. First, we construct a weight map by comparing the contrast of the RGB and NIR images, and then fuse the two images based on the weight map. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective in enhancing visible image and removing the haze.
Recent end-to-end scene text spotters have achieved great improvement in recognizing arbitrary-shaped text instances. Common approaches for text spotting use region of interest pooling or segmentation masks to restrict features to single text instances. However, this makes it hard for the recognizer to decode correct sequences when the detection is not accurate i.e. one or more characters are cropped out. Considering that it is hard to accurately decide word boundaries with only the detector, we propose a novel Detection-agnostic End-to-End Recognizer, DEER, framework. The proposed method reduces the tight dependency between detection and recognition modules by bridging them with a single reference point for each text instance, instead of using detected regions. The proposed method allows the decoder to recognize the texts that are indicated by the reference point, with features from the whole image. Since only a single point is required to recognize the text, the proposed method enables text spotting without an arbitrarily-shaped detector or bounding polygon annotations. Experimental results present that the proposed method achieves competitive results on regular and arbitrarily-shaped text spotting benchmarks. Further analysis shows that DEER is robust to the detection errors. The code and dataset will be publicly available.
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