# ET-SAM: Efficient Point Prompt Prediction in SAM for Unified Scene Text Detection and Layout Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25168 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25168/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [Simple Copy-Paste is a Strong Data Augmentation Method for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07177/) (2020)
- [EAST: An Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03155/) (2017)
- [Track Anything: Segment Anything Meets Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11968/) (2023)
- [Real-time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08947/) (2019)
- [Segment and Track Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06558/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Efficient and Accurate Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection with Pixel Aggregation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05900/) (2019)
- [SurgicalSAM: Efficient Class Promptable Surgical Instrument Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08746/) (2023)
- [Towards End-to-End Unified Scene Text Detection and Layout Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15143/) (2022)
- [Real-Time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization and Adaptive Scale Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10304/) (2022)
- [ABCNet v2: Adaptive Bezier-Curve Network for Real-time End-to-end Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03620/) (2021)
- [Fourier Contour Embedding for Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10442/) (2021)
- [DeepSolo: Let Transformer Decoder with Explicit Points Solo for Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10772/) (2022)
- [Text Spotting Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01918/) (2022)
- [DPText-DETR: Towards Better Scene Text Detection with Dynamic Points in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04491/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Text Segmentation: A Novel Dataset and A Text-Specific Refinement Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14021/) (2020)
- [Point, Segment and Count: A Generalized Framework for Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12386/) (2023)
- [Matting Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05399/) (2023)
- [Hi-SAM: Marrying Segment Anything Model for Hierarchical Text Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17904/) (2024)
- [ESTextSpotter: Towards Better Scene Text Spotting with Explicit Synergy in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10147/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Previous works based on Segment Anything Model (SAM) have achieved promising performance in unified scene text detection and layout analysis. However, the typical reliance on pixel-level text segmentation for sampling thousands of foreground points as prompts leads to unsatisfied inference latency and limited data utilization. To address above issues, we propose ET-SAM, an Efficient framework with two decoders for unified scene Text detection and layout analysis based on SAM. Technically, we customize a lightweight point decoder that produces word heatmaps for achieving a few foreground points, thereby eliminating excessive point prompts and accelerating inference. Without the dependence on pixel-level segmentation, we further design a joint training strategy to leverage existing data with heterogeneous text-level annotations. Specifically, the datasets with multi-level, word-level only, and line-level only annotations are combined in parallel as a unified training set. For these datasets, we introduce three corresponding sets of learnable task prompts in both the point decoder and hierarchical mask decoder to mitigate discrepancies across datasets.Extensive experiments demonstrate that, compared to the previous SAM-based architecture, ET-SAM achieves about 3× inference acceleration while obtaining competitive performance on HierText, and improves an average of 11.0% F-score on Total-Text, CTW1500, and ICDAR15.