Fuzzy Semantics for Arbitrary-Shaped Scene Text Detection

To robustly detect arbitrary-shaped scene texts, bottom-up methods are widely explored for their flexibility. Due to the highly homogeneous texture and cluttered distribution of scene texts, it is nontrivial for segmentation-based methods to discover the separatrixes between adjacent instances. To effectively separate nearby texts, many methods adopt the seed expansion strategy that segments shrunken text regions as seed areas, and then iteratively expands the seed areas into intact text regions. In seek of a more straightforward way that does not rely on seed area segmentation and avoid possible error accumulation brought by iterative processing, we propose a redundancy removal strategy. In this work, we directly explore two types of fuzzy semantics—text and separatrix—that do not possess specific boundaries, and separate cluttered instances by excluding the separatrix pixels from text regions. To deal with the fuzzy semantic boundaries, we also conduct reliability analysis in both optimization and inference stage to suppress false positive pixels at ambiguous locations. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.