# CentripetalText: An Efficient Text Instance Representation for Scene Text Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.05945 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05945/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (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)
- [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)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [BiSeNet: Bilateral Segmentation Network for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00897/) (2018)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [Generalized Focal Loss: Learning Qualified and Distributed Bounding Boxes for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04388/) (2020)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)
- [Character Region Awareness for Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01941/) (2019)
- [Libra R-CNN: Towards Balanced Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02701/) (2019)
- [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)
- [ABCNet: Real-time Scene Text Spotting with Adaptive Bezier-Curve Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10200/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Mask TextSpotter v3: Segmentation Proposal Network for Robust Scene Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09482/) (2020)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [LVLM-eHub: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09265/) (2023)
- [Towards End-to-End Unified Scene Text Detection and Layout Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15143/) (2022)
- [Arbitrary Shape Text Detection via Boundary Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05320/) (2022)
- [Towards Robust Real-Time Scene Text Detection: From Semantic to Instance Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07202/) (2023)
- [FullAnno: A Data Engine for Enhancing Image Comprehension of MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13540/) (2024)
- [CBNet: A Plug-and-Play Network for Segmentation-Based Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02340/) (2022)
- [Text Detection Forgot About Document OCR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07903/) (2022)
- [Spotlight Text Detector: Spotlight on Candidate Regions Like a Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16820/) (2024)
- [PBFormer: Capturing Complex Scene Text Shape with Polynomial Band Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15004/) (2023)
- [Real-Time Text Detection with Similar Mask in Traffic, Industrial, and Natural Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02794/) (2024)
- [Aggregated Text Transformer for Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13984/) (2022)
- [Deformable Kernel Expansion Model for Efficient Arbitrary-shaped Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15737/) (2023)
- [Focus Entirety and Perceive Environment for Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16827/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scene text detection remains a grand challenge due to the variation in text curvatures, orientations, and aspect ratios. One of the hardest problems in this task is how to represent text instances of arbitrary shapes. Although many methods have been proposed to model irregular texts in a flexible manner, most of them lose simplicity and robustness. Their complicated post-processings and the regression under Dirac delta distribution undermine the detection performance and the generalization ability. In this paper, we propose an efficient text instance representation named CentripetalText (CT), which decomposes text instances into the combination of text kernels and centripetal shifts. Specifically, we utilize the centripetal shifts to implement pixel aggregation, guiding the external text pixels to the internal text kernels. The relaxation operation is integrated into the dense regression for centripetal shifts, allowing the correct prediction in a range instead of a specific value. The convenient reconstruction of text contours and the tolerance of prediction errors in our method guarantee the high detection accuracy and the fast inference speed, respectively. Besides, we shrink our text detector into a proposal generation module, namely CentripetalText Proposal Network, replacing Segmentation Proposal Network in Mask TextSpotter v3 and producing more accurate proposals. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct experiments on several commonly used scene text benchmarks, including both curved and multi-oriented text datasets. For the task of scene text detection, our approach achieves superior or competitive performance compared to other existing methods, e.g., F-measure of 86.3% at 40.0 FPS on Total-Text, F-measure of 86.1% at 34.8 FPS on MSRA-TD500, etc. For the task of end-to-end scene text recognition, our method outperforms Mask TextSpotter v3 by 1.1% on Total-Text.