# Total-Text: A Comprehensive Dataset for Scene Text Detection and Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10400 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10400/

## Key facts

- Cited by 162 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 162)

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- [Draw-and-Understand: Leveraging Visual Prompts to Enable MLLMs to Comprehend What You Want](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20271/) (2024)
- [Towards End-to-End Unified Scene Text Detection and Layout Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15143/) (2022)
- [Real-Time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization and Adaptive Scale Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10304/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Transformers in Remote Sensing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01206/) (2022)
- [Multi-modal In-Context Learning Makes an Ego-evolving Scene Text Recognizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13120/) (2023)
- [Perceive Anything: Recognize, Explain, Caption, and Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05302/) (2025)
- [PGNet: Real-time Arbitrarily-Shaped Text Spotting with Point Gathering Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05458/) (2021)
- [Open Images V5 Text Annotation and Yet Another Mask Text Spotter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12326/) (2021)
- [Exploring OCR Capabilities of GPT-4V(ision) : A Quantitative and In-depth Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16809/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Text Line Recognition Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07787/) (2021)
- [SPTS: Single-Point Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07917/) (2021)
- [Reading and Writing: Discriminative and Generative Modeling for Self-Supervised Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00193/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Scene Text Recognition: A Data Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08723/) (2023)
- [Towards Weakly-Supervised Text Spotting using a Multi-Task Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05508/) (2022)
- [DocKylin: A Large Multimodal Model for Visual Document Understanding with Efficient Visual Slimming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19101/) (2024)
- [GLASS: Global to Local Attention for Scene-Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03364/) (2022)
- [Optimal Boxes: Boosting End-to-End Scene Text Recognition by Adjusting Annotated Bounding Boxes via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11934/) (2022)
- [Hi-SAM: Marrying Segment Anything Model for Hierarchical Text Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17904/) (2024)
- [LocateAnything: Fast and High-Quality Vision-Language Grounding with Parallel Box Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27365/) (2026)
- [Language Matters: A Weakly Supervised Vision-Language Pre-training Approach for Scene Text Detection and Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03911/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text in curve orientation, despite being one of the common text orientations in real world environment, has close to zero existence in well received scene text datasets such as ICDAR2013 and MSRA-TD500. The main motivation of Total-Text is to fill this gap and facilitate a new research direction for the scene text community. On top of the conventional horizontal and multi-oriented texts, it features curved-oriented text. Total-Text is highly diversified in orientations, more than half of its images have a combination of more than two orientations. Recently, a new breed of solutions that casted text detection as a segmentation problem has demonstrated their effectiveness against multi-oriented text. In order to evaluate its robustness against curved text, we fine-tuned DeconvNet and benchmark it on Total-Text. Total-Text with its annotation is available at https://github.com/cs-chan/Total-Text-Dataset