Bridging the Gap Between End-to-End and Two-Step Text Spotting
Authors: Mingxin Huang, Hongliang Li, Yuliang Liu, Xiang Bai, Lianwen Jin

Modularity plays a crucial role in the development and maintenance of complex systems. While end-to-end text spotting efficiently mitigates the issues of error accumulation and sub-optimal performance seen in traditional two-step methodologies the two-step methods continue to be favored in many competitions and practical settings due to their superior modularity. In this paper we introduce Bridging Text Spotting a novel approach that resolves the error accumulation and suboptimal performance issues in two-step methods while retaining modularity. To achieve this we adopt a well-trained detector and recognizer that are developed and trained independently and then lock their parameters to preserve their already acquired capabilities. Subsequently we introduce a Bridge that connects the locked detector and recognizer through a zero-initialized neural network. This zero-initialized neural network initialized with weights set to zeros ensures seamless integration of the large receptive field features in detection into the locked recognizer. Furthermore since the fixed detector and recognizer cannot naturally acquire end-to-end optimization features we adopt the Adapter to facilitate their efficient learning of these features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through extensive experiments: Connecting the latest detector and recognizer through Bridging Text Spotting we achieved an accuracy of 83.3% on Total-Text 69.8% on CTW1500 and 89.5% on ICDAR 2015. The code is available at https://github.com/mxin262/Bridging-Text-Spotting.