# Conceptual Text Region Network: Cognition-Inspired Accurate Scene Text Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.09179 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09179/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [EAST: An Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03155/) (2017)
- [Real-time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08947/) (2019)
- [Arbitrary-Oriented Scene Text Detection via Rotation Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01086/) (2017)
- [Mask TextSpotter: An End-to-End Trainable Neural Network for Spotting Text with Arbitrary Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08207/) (2019)
- [Total-Text: A Comprehensive Dataset for Scene Text Detection and Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10400/) (2017)
- [Shape Robust Text Detection with Progressive Scale Expansion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12473/) (2019)
- [TextBoxes: A Fast Text Detector with a Single Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06779/) (2016)
- [TextBoxes++: A Single-Shot Oriented Scene Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02765/) (2018)
- [TextSnake: A Flexible Representation for Detecting Text of Arbitrary Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01544/) (2018)
- [Efficient and Accurate Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection with Pixel Aggregation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05900/) (2019)
- [Rotation-Sensitive Regression for Oriented Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05265/) (2018)
- [Detecting Text in Natural Image with Connectionist Text Proposal Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03605/) (2016)
- [Detecting Curve Text in the Wild: New Dataset and New Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02170/) (2017)
- [All You Need Is Boundary: Toward Arbitrary-Shaped Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09550/) (2019)
- [PixelLink: Detecting Scene Text via Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01315/) (2018)
- [Text Perceptron: Towards End-to-End Arbitrary-Shaped Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06820/) (2020)
- [Applications of Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning to Biological Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03985/) (2017)
- [Deep Direct Regression for Multi-Oriented Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08289/) (2017)
- [Multi-Oriented Text Detection with Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04018/) (2016)
- [Scene Text Detection with Supervised Pyramid Context Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08605/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [StrokeNet: Stroke Assisted and Hierarchical Graph Reasoning Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11718/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Segmentation-based methods are widely used for scene text detection due to their superiority in describing arbitrary-shaped text instances. However, two major problems still exist: 1) current label generation techniques are mostly empirical and lack theoretical support, discouraging elaborate label design; 2) as a result, most methods rely heavily on text kernel segmentation which is unstable and requires deliberate tuning. To address these challenges, we propose a human cognition-inspired framework, termed, Conceptual Text Region Network (CTRNet). The framework utilizes Conceptual Text Regions (CTRs), which is a class of cognition-based tools inheriting good mathematical properties, allowing for sophisticated label design. Another component of CTRNet is an inference pipeline that, with the help of CTRs, completely omits the need for text kernel segmentation. Compared with previous segmentation-based methods, our approach is not only more interpretable but also more accurate. Experimental results show that CTRNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark CTW1500, Total-Text, MSRA-TD500, and ICDAR 2015 datasets, yielding performance gains of up to 2.0%. Notably, to the best of our knowledge, CTRNet is among the first detection models to achieve F-measures higher than 85.0% on all four of the benchmarks, with remarkable consistency and stability.