DeepText: A new approach for text proposal generation and text detection in natural images

In this paper, we develop a new approach called DeepText for text region proposal generation and text detection in natural images via a fully convolutional neural network (CNN). First, we propose the novel inception region proposal network (Inception-RPN), which slides an inception network with multi-scale windows over the top of convolutional feature maps and associates a set of text characteristic prior bounding boxes with each sliding position to generate high recall word region proposals. Next, we present a powerful text detection network that embeds ambiguous text category (ATC) information and multi-level region-of-interest pooling (MLRP) for text and non-text classification and accurate localization refinement. Our approach achieves an F-measure of 0.83 and 0.85 on the ICDAR 2011 and 2013 robust text detection benchmarks, outperforming previous state-of-the-art results.