# Arbitrary Shape Text Detection via Segmentation with Probability Maps

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.12419 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12419/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [CANet: Class-Agnostic Segmentation Networks with Iterative Refinement and Attentive Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02351/) (2019)
- [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 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)
- [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)
- [Detecting Oriented Text in Natural Images by Linking Segments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06520/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [TextField: Learning A Deep Direction Field for Irregular Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01393/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [SlowFast-LLaVA-1.5: A Family of Token-Efficient Video Large Language Models for Long-Form Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18943/) (2025)
- [Inverse-like Antagonistic Scene Text Spotting via Reading-Order Estimation and Dynamic Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03637/) (2024)
- [LRANet: Towards Accurate and Efficient Scene Text Detection with Low-Rank Approximation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15142/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Edge Approximation Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04001/) (2025)
- [Scene Text Recognition with Single-Point Decoding Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01914/) (2022)
- [Artistic-style text detector and a new Movie-Poster dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16307/) (2024)
- [EpiSAM: Character Segmentation in Challenging Stone Inscriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28859/) (2026)
- [Aggregated Text Transformer for Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13984/) (2022)
- [BPDO:Boundary Points Dynamic Optimization for Arbitrary Shape Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09997/) (2024)
- [Video-Language Alignment via Spatio-Temporal Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11677/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Real-World Super-Resolution via Rectified Flow Degradation Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07214/) (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 shape text detection is a challenging task due to the significantly varied sizes and aspect ratios, arbitrary orientations or shapes, inaccurate annotations, etc. Due to the scalability of pixel-level prediction, segmentation-based methods can adapt to various shape texts and hence attracted considerable attention recently. However, accurate pixel-level annotations of texts are formidable, and the existing datasets for scene text detection only provide coarse-grained boundary annotations. Consequently, numerous misclassified text pixels or background pixels inside annotations always exist, degrading the performance of segmentation-based text detection methods. Generally speaking, whether a pixel belongs to text or not is highly related to the distance with the adjacent annotation boundary. With this observation, in this paper, we propose an innovative and robust segmentation-based detection method via probability maps for accurately detecting text instances. To be concrete, we adopt a Sigmoid Alpha Function (SAF) to transfer the distances between boundaries and their inside pixels to a probability map. However, one probability map can not cover complex probability distributions well because of the uncertainty of coarse-grained text boundary annotations. Therefore, we adopt a group of probability maps computed by a series of Sigmoid Alpha Functions to describe the possible probability distributions. In addition, we propose an iterative model to learn to predict and assimilate probability maps for providing enough information to reconstruct text instances. Finally, simple region growth algorithms are adopted to aggregate probability maps to complete text instances. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of detection accuracy on several benchmarks.