# TextDCT: Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection via Discrete Cosine Transform Mask

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13381 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13381/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [EAST: An Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03155/) (2017)
- [COCO-Text: Dataset and Benchmark for Text Detection and Recognition in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.07140/) (2016)
- [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)
- [FCOS: A simple and strong anchor-free object detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09214/) (2020)
- [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)
- [ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Arbitrary-Shaped Text (RRC-ArT)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07145/) (2019)
- [ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Multi-lingual Scene Text Detection and Recognition -- RRC-MLT-2019](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00945/) (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)
- [FOTS: Fast Oriented Text Spotting with a Unified Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01671/) (2018)
- [Detecting Text in Natural Image with Connectionist Text Proposal Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03605/) (2016)
- [Fourier Contour Embedding for Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10442/) (2021)
- [Deep Relational Reasoning Graph Network for Arbitrary Shape Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07493/) (2020)
- [ContourNet: Taking a Further Step toward Accurate Arbitrary-shaped Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04940/) (2020)
- [Look More Than Once: An Accurate Detector for Text of Arbitrary Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06535/) (2019)

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

- [Text Growing on Leaf](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03016/) (2022)
- [LRANet: Towards Accurate and Efficient Scene Text Detection with Low-Rank Approximation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15142/) (2023)
- [Spotlight Text Detector: Spotlight on Candidate Regions Like a Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16820/) (2024)
- [LRANet++: Low-Rank Approximation Network for Accurate and Efficient Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05818/) (2025)
- [Real-Time Text Detection with Similar Mask in Traffic, Industrial, and Natural Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02794/) (2024)
- [CT-Net: Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection via Contour Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13310/) (2023)
- [MFH: Marrying Frequency Domain with Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00430/) (2025)
- [Deformation Robust Text Spotting with Geometric Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16404/) (2023)
- [Focus Entirety and Perceive Environment for Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16827/) (2024)
- [Automated document processing system for government agencies using DBNET++ and BART models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13303/) (2025)
- [Text images processing system using artificial intelligence models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11691/) (2025)
- [Text-Pass Filter: An Efficient Scene Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18098/) (2026)
- [TextDS: Parameter-Efficient Representation Alignment for Scene Text Detection under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28077/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Arbitrary-shaped scene text detection is a challenging task due to the variety of text changes in font, size, color, and orientation. Most existing regression based methods resort to regress the masks or contour points of text regions to model the text instances. However, regressing the complete masks requires high training complexity, and contour points are not sufficient to capture the details of highly curved texts. To tackle the above limitations, we propose a novel light-weight anchor-free text detection framework called TextDCT, which adopts the discrete cosine transform (DCT) to encode the text masks as compact vectors. Further, considering the imbalanced number of training samples among pyramid layers, we only employ a single-level head for top-down prediction. To model the multi-scale texts in a single-level head, we introduce a novel positive sampling strategy by treating the shrunk text region as positive samples, and design a feature awareness module (FAM) for spatial-awareness and scale-awareness by fusing rich contextual information and focusing on more significant features. Moreover, we propose a segmented non-maximum suppression (S-NMS) method that can filter low-quality mask regressions. Extensive experiments are conducted on four challenging datasets, which demonstrate our TextDCT obtains competitive performance on both accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, TextDCT achieves F-measure of 85.1 at 17.2 frames per second (FPS) and F-measure of 84.9 at 15.1 FPS for CTW1500 and Total-Text datasets, respectively.