Motivated by the success of powerful while expensive techniques to recognize words in a holistic way [1, 2, 3] , object proposals techniques emerge as an alternative to the traditional text detectors. In this paper we introduce a novel object proposals method that is specifically designed for text. We rely on a similarity based region grouping algorithm that generates a hierarchy of word hypotheses. Over the nodes of this hierarchy it is possible to apply a holistic word recognition method in an efficient way. Our experiments demonstrate that the presented method is superior in its ability of producing good quality word proposals when compared with class-independent algorithms. We shows impressive recall rates with a few thousand proposals in different standard benchmarks, including focused or incidental text datasets, and multi-language scenarios. Moreover, the combination of our object proposals with existing whole-word recognizers [2, 3] show competitive performance in end-to-end word spotting, and, in some benchmarks, outperforms previously published results. Concretely, in the challenging ICDAR2015 Incidental Text dataset, we overcome in more than 10 percent f-score the best-performing method in the last ICDAR Robust Reading Competition [4] . Source code of the complete end-to-end system is available at https://github.com/lluisgomez/TextProposals.
Gomez et al. REF propose instead a text-specific object proposals method that is based on generating an hierarchy of word hypotheses based on a similarity region grouping algorithm.
TextProposals: a Text-specific Selective Search Algorithm for Word Spotting in the Wild
ArXiv
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Mathematics Computer Science