# Real-time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.08947 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08947/

## Key facts

- Cited by 214 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Nov 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 214)

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- [DocPedia: Unleashing the Power of Large Multimodal Model in the Frequency Domain for Versatile Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11810/) (2023)
- [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)
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- [AppAgent v2: Advanced Agent for Flexible Mobile Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11824/) (2024)
- [Few Could Be Better Than All: Feature Sampling and Grouping for Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15221/) (2022)
- [DocILE Benchmark for Document Information Localization and Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05658/) (2023)
- [DPText-DETR: Towards Better Scene Text Detection with Dynamic Points in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04491/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Boundary Proposal Network for Arbitrary Shape Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12664/) (2021)
- [Reading and Writing: Discriminative and Generative Modeling for Self-Supervised Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00193/) (2022)
- [Turning a CLIP Model into a Scene Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14338/) (2023)
- [MMOCR: A Comprehensive Toolbox for Text Detection, Recognition and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06543/) (2021)
- [GeoLayoutLM: Geometric Pre-training for Visual Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10759/) (2023)
- [PP-OCRv2: Bag of Tricks for Ultra Lightweight OCR System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03144/) (2021)
- [MaskOCR: Text Recognition with Masked Encoder-Decoder Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00311/) (2022)
- [GLASS: Global to Local Attention for Scene-Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03364/) (2022)
- [SoccerNet Game State Reconstruction: End-to-End Athlete Tracking and Identification on a Minimap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11335/) (2024)
- [MOST: A Multi-Oriented Scene Text Detector with Localization Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01070/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)

Recently, segmentation-based methods are quite popular in scene text detection, as the segmentation results can more accurately describe scene text of various shapes such as curve text. However, the post-processing of binarization is essential for segmentation-based detection, which converts probability maps produced by a segmentation method into bounding boxes/regions of text. In this paper, we propose a module named Differentiable Binarization (DB), which can perform the binarization process in a segmentation network. Optimized along with a DB module, a segmentation network can adaptively set the thresholds for binarization, which not only simplifies the post-processing but also enhances the performance of text detection. Based on a simple segmentation network, we validate the performance improvements of DB on five benchmark datasets, which consistently achieves state-of-the-art results, in terms of both detection accuracy and speed. In particular, with a light-weight backbone, the performance improvements by DB are significant so that we can look for an ideal tradeoff between detection accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, with a backbone of ResNet-18, our detector achieves an F-measure of 82.8, running at 62 FPS, on the MSRA-TD500 dataset. Code is available at: https://github.com/MhLiao/DB