# Detecting Oriented Text in Natural Images by Linking Segments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06520 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06520/

## Key facts

- Cited by 80 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 80)

- [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)
- [UniDoc: A Universal Large Multimodal Model for Simultaneous Text Detection, Recognition, Spotting and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11592/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Turning a CLIP Model into a Scene Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14338/) (2023)
- [MOST: A Multi-Oriented Scene Text Detector with Localization Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01070/) (2021)
- [Towards Real-world X-ray Security Inspection: A High-Quality Benchmark and Lateral Inhibition Module for Prohibited Items Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09917/) (2021)
- [Arbitrary Shape Text Detection via Boundary Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05320/) (2022)
- [PolarMask++: Enhanced Polar Representation for Single-Shot Instance Segmentation and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02184/) (2021)
- [Language Matters: A Weakly Supervised Vision-Language Pre-training Approach for Scene Text Detection and Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03911/) (2022)
- [TPSNet: Reverse Thinking of Thin Plate Splines for Arbitrary Shape Scene Text Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12826/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Modeling Entities as Semantic Points for Visual Information Extraction in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13095/) (2023)
- [Vision-Language Pre-Training for Boosting Scene Text Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13867/) (2022)
- [Kernel Proposal Network for Arbitrary Shape Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06410/) (2022)
- [Industrial Scene Text Detection with Refined Feature-attentive Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12663/) (2021)
- [Arbitrary Shape Text Detection via Segmentation with Probability Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12419/) (2022)
- [I3CL:Intra- and Inter-Instance Collaborative Learning for Arbitrary-shaped Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01343/) (2021)
- [CentripetalText: An Efficient Text Instance Representation for Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05945/) (2021)
- [Towards Robust Real-Time Scene Text Detection: From Semantic to Instance Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07202/) (2023)
- [Text Growing on Leaf](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03016/) (2022)
- [Video Text Tracking With a Spatio-Temporal Complementary Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04987/) (2021)
- [ODM: A Text-Image Further Alignment Pre-training Approach for Scene Text Detection and Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00303/) (2024)
- [FAST: Faster Arbitrarily-Shaped Text Detector with Minimalist Kernel Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02394/) (2021)
- [Turning a CLIP Model into a Scene Text Spotter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10408/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most state-of-the-art text detection methods are specific to horizontal Latin text and are not fast enough for real-time applications. We introduce Segment Linking (SegLink), an oriented text detection method. The main idea is to decompose text into two locally detectable elements, namely segments and links. A segment is an oriented box covering a part of a word or text line; A link connects two adjacent segments, indicating that they belong to the same word or text line. Both elements are detected densely at multiple scales by an end-to-end trained, fully-convolutional neural network. Final detections are produced by combining segments connected by links. Compared with previous methods, SegLink improves along the dimensions of accuracy, speed, and ease of training. It achieves an f-measure of 75.0% on the standard ICDAR 2015 Incidental (Challenge 4) benchmark, outperforming the previous best by a large margin. It runs at over 20 FPS on 512x512 images. Moreover, without modification, SegLink is able to detect long lines of non-Latin text, such as Chinese.