Scene text detection, an important step of scene text reading systems, has
witnessed rapid development with convolutional neural networks. Nonetheless,
two main challenges still exist and hamper its deployment to real-world
applications. The first problem is the trade-off between speed and accuracy.
The second one is to model the arbitrary-shaped text instance. Recently, some
methods have been proposed to tackle arbitrary-shaped text detection, but they
rarely take the speed of the entire pipeline into consideration, which may fall
short in practical applications.In this paper, we propose an efficient and
accurate arbitrary-shaped text detector, termed Pixel Aggregation Network
(PAN), which is equipped with a low computational-cost segmentation head and a
learnable post-processing. More specifically, the segmentation head is made up
of Feature Pyramid Enhancement Module (FPEM) and Feature Fusion Module (FFM).
FPEM is a cascadable U-shaped module, which can introduce multi-level
information to guide the better segmentation. FFM can gather the features given
by the FPEMs of different depths into a final feature for segmentation. The
learnable post-processing is implemented by Pixel Aggregation (PA), which can
precisely aggregate text pixels by predicted similarity vectors. Experiments on
several standard benchmarks validate the superiority of the proposed PAN. It is
worth noting that our method can achieve a competitive F-measure of 79.9% at
84.2 FPS on CTW1500.

本文提出了一种高效准确的任意形状文本检测器 Pixel Aggregation Network (PAN)，它配备了低计算成本的分割头和可学习的后处理，其中分割头由 Feature Pyramid Enhancement Module (FPEM) 和 Feature Fusion Module (FFM) 组成。通过预测相似向量准确地聚合文本像素的像素聚合 (PA) 实现可学习后处理。同时，该方法在几个标准基准测试中取得了优异的表现。