# EAST: An Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.03155 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03155/

## Key facts

- Cited by 248 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 248)

- [Oriented R-CNN for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05699/) (2021)
- [TextDiffuser: Diffusion Models as Text Painters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10855/) (2023)
- [General OCR Theory: Towards OCR-2.0 via a Unified End-to-end Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01704/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Rotated Object Detection with Gaussian Wasserstein Distance Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11952/) (2021)
- [TextDiffuser-2: Unleashing the Power of Language Models for Text Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16465/) (2023)
- [MMRotate: A Rotated Object Detection Benchmark using PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13317/) (2022)
- [Towards End-to-End Unified Scene Text Detection and Layout Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15143/) (2022)
- [LayoutLLM: Layout Instruction Tuning with Large Language Models for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05225/) (2024)
- [Real-Time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization and Adaptive Scale Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10304/) (2022)
- [StrucTexT: Structured Text Understanding with Multi-Modal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02923/) (2021)
- [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)
- [OmniParser: A Unified Framework for Text Spotting, Key Information Extraction and Table Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19128/) (2024)
- [The KFIoU Loss for Rotated Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12558/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Hate-CLIPper: Multimodal Hateful Meme Classification based on Cross-modal Interaction of CLIP Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05916/) (2022)
- [DPText-DETR: Towards Better Scene Text Detection with Dynamic Points in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04491/) (2022)
- [PGNet: Real-time Arbitrarily-Shaped Text Spotting with Point Gathering Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05458/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Boundary Proposal Network for Arbitrary Shape Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12664/) (2021)
- [Vision Grid Transformer for Document Layout Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14978/) (2023)
- [LGPMA: Complicated Table Structure Recognition with Local and Global Pyramid Mask Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06224/) (2021)
- [SPTS: Single-Point Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07917/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Scene Text Recognition: A Data Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08723/) (2023)
- [Turning a CLIP Model into a Scene Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14338/) (2023)
- [Document Parsing Unveiled: Techniques, Challenges, and Prospects for Structured Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21169/) (2024)
- [Phase-Shifting Coder: Predicting Accurate Orientation in Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06368/) (2022)
- [PIMNet: A Parallel, Iterative and Mimicking Network for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04145/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Previous approaches for scene text detection have already achieved promising performances across various benchmarks. However, they usually fall short when dealing with challenging scenarios, even when equipped with deep neural network models, because the overall performance is determined by the interplay of multiple stages and components in the pipelines. In this work, we propose a simple yet powerful pipeline that yields fast and accurate text detection in natural scenes. The pipeline directly predicts words or text lines of arbitrary orientations and quadrilateral shapes in full images, eliminating unnecessary intermediate steps (e.g., candidate aggregation and word partitioning), with a single neural network. The simplicity of our pipeline allows concentrating efforts on designing loss functions and neural network architecture. Experiments on standard datasets including ICDAR 2015, COCO-Text and MSRA-TD500 demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. On the ICDAR 2015 dataset, the proposed algorithm achieves an F-score of 0.7820 at 13.2fps at 720p resolution.
