# Detecting Text in Natural Image with Connectionist Text Proposal Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03605 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03605/

## Key facts

- Cited by 85 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 85)

- [OCR-free Document Understanding Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15664/) (2021)
- [WenetSpeech: A 10000+ Hours Multi-domain Mandarin Corpus for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03370/) (2021)
- [General OCR Theory: Towards OCR-2.0 via a Unified End-to-end Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01704/) (2024)
- [Real-Time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization and Adaptive Scale Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10304/) (2022)
- [ABCNet v2: Adaptive Bezier-Curve Network for Real-time End-to-end Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03620/) (2021)
- [Fourier Contour Embedding for Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10442/) (2021)
- [Text Spotting Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01918/) (2022)
- [SPTS v2: Single-Point Scene Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01635/) (2023)
- [PAN++: Towards Efficient and Accurate End-to-End Spotting of Arbitrarily-Shaped Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00405/) (2021)
- [Few Could Be Better Than All: Feature Sampling and Grouping for Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15221/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Boundary Proposal Network for Arbitrary Shape Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12664/) (2021)
- [SPTS: Single-Point Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07917/) (2021)
- [Turning a CLIP Model into a Scene Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14338/) (2023)
- [PIMNet: A Parallel, Iterative and Mimicking Network for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04145/) (2021)
- [Single Frame Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigation: A Benchmark Study and A New Physics-Inspired Transformer Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10040/) (2022)
- [PolarMask++: Enhanced Polar Representation for Single-Shot Instance Segmentation and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02184/) (2021)
- [TPSNet: Reverse Thinking of Thin Plate Splines for Arbitrary Shape Scene Text Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12826/) (2021)
- [Physics-Driven Turbulence Image Restoration with Stochastic Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10603/) (2023)
- [Mask is All You Need: Rethinking Mask R-CNN for Dense and Arbitrary-Shaped Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03426/) (2021)
- [Stroke-Based Scene Text Erasing Using Synthetic Data for Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11493/) (2021)
- [A Multiplexed Network for End-to-End, Multilingual OCR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15992/) (2021)
- [Kernel Proposal Network for Arbitrary Shape Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06410/) (2022)
- [Arbitrary Shape Text Detection via Segmentation with Probability Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12419/) (2022)
- [CentripetalText: An Efficient Text Instance Representation for Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05945/) (2021)
- [TextDCT: Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection via Discrete Cosine Transform Mask](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13381/) (2022)
- [Towards Robust Real-Time Scene Text Detection: From Semantic to Instance Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07202/) (2023)
- [Visually Guided Generative Text-Layout Pre-training for Document Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16516/) (2024)
- [FAST: Faster Arbitrarily-Shaped Text Detector with Minimalist Kernel Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02394/) (2021)
- [All You Need is a Second Look: Towards Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12720/) (2021)
- [Real-time End-to-End Video Text Spotter with Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08417/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a novel Connectionist Text Proposal Network (CTPN) that accurately localizes text lines in natural image. The CTPN detects a text line in a sequence of fine-scale text proposals directly in convolutional feature maps. We develop a vertical anchor mechanism that jointly predicts location and text/non-text score of each fixed-width proposal, considerably improving localization accuracy. The sequential proposals are naturally connected by a recurrent neural network, which is seamlessly incorporated into the convolutional network, resulting in an end-to-end trainable model. This allows the CTPN to explore rich context information of image, making it powerful to detect extremely ambiguous text. The CTPN works reliably on multi-scale and multi- language text without further post-processing, departing from previous bottom-up methods requiring multi-step post-processing. It achieves 0.88 and 0.61 F-measure on the ICDAR 2013 and 2015 benchmarks, surpass- ing recent results [8, 35] by a large margin. The CTPN is computationally efficient with 0:14s/image, by using the very deep VGG16 model [27]. Online demo is available at: http://textdet.com/.