# Real-Time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization and Adaptive Scale Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.10304 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10304/

## Key facts

- Cited by 94 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (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)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [Deformable ConvNets v2: More Deformable, Better Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11168/) (2018)
- [RefineNet: Multi-Path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06612/) (2016)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)
- [Residual Attention Network for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06904/) (2017)
- [GCNet: Non-local Networks Meet Squeeze-Excitation Networks and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11492/) (2019)
- [Character Region Awareness for Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01941/) (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)
- [Asymmetric Non-local Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07678/) (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)
- [RSA: Byzantine-Robust Stochastic Aggregation Methods for Distributed Learning from Heterogeneous Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03761/) (2018)
- [Shape Robust Text Detection with Progressive Scale Expansion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12473/) (2019)
- [Reading Text in the Wild with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1842/) (2014)
- [TextBoxes: A Fast Text Detector with a Single Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06779/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 94)

- [TextDiffuser: Diffusion Models as Text Painters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10855/) (2023)
- [General OCR Theory: Towards OCR-2.0 via a Unified End-to-end Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01704/) (2024)
- [LayoutLLM: Layout Instruction Tuning with Large Language Models for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05225/) (2024)
- [JavisDiT: Joint Audio-Video Diffusion Transformer with Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Prior Synchronization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23377/) (2025)
- [OmniParser: A Unified Framework for Text Spotting, Key Information Extraction and Table Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19128/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Scene Text Recognition: A Data Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08723/) (2023)
- [Turning a CLIP Model into a Scene Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14338/) (2023)
- [StrucTexTv2: Masked Visual-Textual Prediction for Document Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00289/) (2023)
- [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)
- [HOIGen-1M: A Large-scale Dataset for Human-Object Interaction Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23715/) (2025)
- [QSAN: A Near-term Achievable Quantum Self-Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07563/) (2022)
- [OmniParser V2: Structured-Points-of-Thought for Unified Visual Text Parsing and Its Generality to Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16161/) (2025)
- [Visual Text Generation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14138/) (2024)
- [HunyuanOCR Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19575/) (2025)
- [Less is More: Removing Text-regions Improves CLIP Training Efficiency and Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05095/) (2023)
- [TeleWorld: Towards Dynamic Multimodal Synthesis with a 4D World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00051/) (2025)
- [Towards Robust Real-Time Scene Text Detection: From Semantic to Instance Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07202/) (2023)
- [GCoNet+: A Stronger Group Collaborative Co-Salient Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15469/) (2022)
- [Text Growing on Leaf](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03016/) (2022)
- [ODM: A Text-Image Further Alignment Pre-training Approach for Scene Text Detection and Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00303/) (2024)
- [SymphoMotion: Joint Control of Camera Motion and Object Dynamics for Coherent Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03723/) (2026)
- [Turning a CLIP Model into a Scene Text Spotter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10408/) (2023)
- [Bridging Synthetic and Real Worlds for Pre-training Scene Text Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05286/) (2023)
- [Bridging the Gap Between End-to-End and Two-Step Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04624/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Large Language Models for Text-rich Image Understanding: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16586/) (2025)
- [LRANet: Towards Accurate and Efficient Scene Text Detection with Low-Rank Approximation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15142/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Text Spotter for Joint Text Spotting and Layout Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17674/) (2023)
- [Seeing Text in the Dark: Algorithm and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08965/) (2024)
- [MMMORRF: Multimodal Multilingual Modularized Reciprocal Rank Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20698/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, segmentation-based scene text detection methods have drawn extensive attention in the scene text detection field, because of their superiority in detecting the text instances of arbitrary shapes and extreme aspect ratios, profiting from the pixel-level descriptions. However, the vast majority of the existing segmentation-based approaches are limited to their complex post-processing algorithms and the scale robustness of their segmentation models, where the post-processing algorithms are not only isolated to the model optimization but also time-consuming and the scale robustness is usually strengthened by fusing multi-scale feature maps directly. In this paper, we propose a Differentiable Binarization (DB) module that integrates the binarization process, one of the most important steps in the post-processing procedure, into a segmentation network. Optimized along with the proposed DB module, the segmentation network can produce more accurate results, which enhances the accuracy of text detection with a simple pipeline. Furthermore, an efficient Adaptive Scale Fusion (ASF) module is proposed to improve the scale robustness by fusing features of different scales adaptively. By incorporating the proposed DB and ASF with the segmentation network, our proposed scene text detector consistently achieves state-of-the-art results, in terms of both detection accuracy and speed, on five standard benchmarks.