# Shape Robust Text Detection with Progressive Scale Expansion Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.12473 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12473/

## Key facts

- Cited by 147 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 147)

- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [TextDiffuser: Diffusion Models as Text Painters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10855/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Cylindrical and Asymmetrical 3D Convolution Networks for LiDAR-based Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05441/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Turning a CLIP Model into a Scene Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14338/) (2023)
- [Improving Table Structure Recognition with Visual-Alignment Sequential Coordinate Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06949/) (2023)
- [MMOCR: A Comprehensive Toolbox for Text Detection, Recognition and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06543/) (2021)
- [PingAn-VCGroup's Solution for ICDAR 2021 Competition on Scientific Literature Parsing Task B: Table Recognition to HTML](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01848/) (2021)
- [HRVDA: High-Resolution Visual Document Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06918/) (2024)
- [MOST: A Multi-Oriented Scene Text Detector with Localization Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01070/) (2021)
- [Hi-SAM: Marrying Segment Anything Model for Hierarchical Text Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17904/) (2024)
- [ESTextSpotter: Towards Better Scene Text Spotting with Explicit Synergy in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10147/) (2023)
- [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)
- [A Bilingual, OpenWorld Video Text Dataset and End-to-end Video Text Spotter with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04888/) (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)
- [End-to-End Video Text Spotting with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10539/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Tampered Scene Text Detection in the Era of Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21422/) (2024)
- [TRUST: An Accurate and End-to-End Table structure Recognizer Using Splitting-based Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14687/) (2022)
- [A Multiplexed Network for End-to-End, Multilingual OCR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15992/) (2021)
- [Vision-Language Pre-Training for Boosting Scene Text Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13867/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scene text detection has witnessed rapid progress especially with the recent development of convolutional neural networks. However, there still exists two challenges which prevent the algorithm into industry applications. On the one hand, most of the state-of-art algorithms require quadrangle bounding box which is in-accurate to locate the texts with arbitrary shape. On the other hand, two text instances which are close to each other may lead to a false detection which covers both instances. Traditionally, the segmentation-based approach can relieve the first problem but usually fail to solve the second challenge. To address these two challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel Progressive Scale Expansion Network (PSENet), which can precisely detect text instances with arbitrary shapes. More specifically, PSENet generates the different scale of kernels for each text instance, and gradually expands the minimal scale kernel to the text instance with the complete shape. Due to the fact that there are large geometrical margins among the minimal scale kernels, our method is effective to split the close text instances, making it easier to use segmentation-based methods to detect arbitrary-shaped text instances. Extensive experiments on CTW1500, Total-Text, ICDAR 2015 and ICDAR 2017 MLT validate the effectiveness of PSENet. Notably, on CTW1500, a dataset full of long curve texts, PSENet achieves a F-measure of 74.3% at 27 FPS, and our best F-measure (82.2%) outperforms state-of-art algorithms by 6.6%. The code will be released in the future.