In spite of significant research efforts, the existing scene text detection methods fall short of the challenges and requirements posed in real-life applications. In natural scenes, text segments exhibit a wide range of shape complexities, scale, and font property variations, and they appear mostly incidental. Furthermore, the computational requirement of the detector is an important factor for real-time operation. To address the aforementioned issues, the paper presents a novel scene text detector using a deep convolutional network which efficiently detects arbitrary oriented and complex-shaped text segments from natural scenes and predicts quadrilateral bounding boxes around text segments. The proposed network is designed in a U-shape architecture with the careful incorporation of skip connections to capture complex text attributes at multiple scales. For addressing the computational requirement of the input processing, the proposed scene text detector uses the MobileNet model as the backbone that is designed on depthwise separable convolutions. The network design is integrated with text attention blocks to enhance the learning ability of our detector, where the attention blocks are based on efficient channel attention. The network is trained in a multi-objective formulation supported by a novel text-aware non-maximal procedure to generate final text bounding box predictions. On extensive evaluations on ICDAR2013, ICDAR2015, MSRA-TD500, and COCOText datasets, the paper reports detection F-scores of 0.910, 0.879, 0.830, and 0.617, respectively.

The real-life scene images exhibit a range of variations in text appearances, including complex shapes, variations in sizes, and fancy font properties. Consequently, text recognition from scene images remains a challenging problem in computer vision research. We present a scene text recognition methodology by designing a novel feature-enhanced convolutional recurrent neural network architecture. Our work addresses scene text recognition as well as sequence-to-sequence modeling, where a novel deep encoder–decoder network is proposed. The encoder in the proposed network is designed around a hierarchy of convolutional blocks enabled with spatial attention blocks, followed by bidirectional long short-term memory layers. In contrast to existing methods for scene text recognition, which incorporate temporal attention on the decoder side of the entire architecture, our convolutional architecture incorporates novel spatial attention design to guide feature extraction onto textual details in scene text images. The experiments and analysis demonstrate that our approach learns robust text-specific feature sequences for input images, as the convolution architecture designed for feature extraction is tuned to capture a broader spatial text context. With extensive experiments on ICDAR2013, ICDAR2015, IIIT5K and SVT datasets, the paper demonstrates an improvement over many important state-of-the-art methods.