# Partial Scene Text Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10261 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10261/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [ICDAR 2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Reading Chinese Text on Signboard](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09641/) (2019)
- [Reading Text in the Wild with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1842/) (2014)
- [ICDAR 2019 Competition on Large-scale Street View Text with Partial Labeling -- RRC-LSVT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07741/) (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)
- [Mask TextSpotter v3: Segmentation Proposal Network for Robust Scene Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09482/) (2020)
- [Real-Time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization and Adaptive Scale Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10304/) (2022)
- [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)
- [ABCNet v2: Adaptive Bezier-Curve Network for Real-time End-to-end Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03620/) (2021)
- [SwinTextSpotter: Scene Text Spotting via Better Synergy between Text Detection and Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10209/) (2022)
- [All You Need Is Boundary: Toward Arbitrary-Shaped Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09550/) (2019)
- [Towards Unconstrained End-to-End Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09231/) (2019)
- [Text Perceptron: Towards End-to-End Arbitrary-Shaped Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06820/) (2020)
- [An end-to-end TextSpotter with Explicit Alignment and Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03474/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Visual Text Processing: A Comprehensive Review and Unified Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21682/) (2025)
- [Highlighting What Matters: Promptable Embeddings for Attribute-Focused Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15877/) (2025)
- [MSTAR: Box-free Multi-query Scene Text Retrieval with Attention Recycling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10609/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The task of partial scene text retrieval involves localizing and searching for text instances that are the same or similar to a given query text from an image gallery. However, existing methods can only handle text-line instances, leaving the problem of searching for partial patches within these text-line instances unsolved due to a lack of patch annotations in the training data. To address this issue, we propose a network that can simultaneously retrieve both text-line instances and their partial patches. Our method embeds the two types of data (query text and scene text instances) into a shared feature space and measures their cross-modal similarities. To handle partial patches, our proposed approach adopts a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) approach to learn their similarities with query text, without requiring extra annotations. However, constructing bags, which is a standard step of conventional MIL approaches, can introduce numerous noisy samples for training, and lower inference speed. To address this issue, we propose a Ranking MIL (RankMIL) approach to adaptively filter those noisy samples. Additionally, we present a Dynamic Partial Match Algorithm (DPMA) that can directly search for the target partial patch from a text-line instance during the inference stage, without requiring bags. This greatly improves the search efficiency and the performance of retrieving partial patches. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/lanfeng4659/PSTR.