Quadbox: Quadrilateral Bounding Box Based Scene Text Detection Using Vector Regression

Scene text appears with a wide range of sizes and arbitrary orientations. For detecting such text in the scene image, the quadrilateral bounding boxes provide a much tight bounding box compared to the rotated rectangle. In this work, a vector regression method has been proposed for text detection in the wild to generate a quadrilateral bounding box. The bounding box prediction using direct regression requires predicting the vectors from each position inside the quadrilateral. It needs to predict four-vectors, and each varies drastically in its length and orientation. It makes the vector prediction a difficult problem. To overcome this, we have proposed a centroid-centric vector regression by utilizing the geometry of quadrilateral. In this work, we have added the philosophy of indirect regression to direct regression by shifting all points within the quadrilateral to the centroid and afterward performed vector regression from shifted points. The experimental results show the improvement of the quadrilateral approach over the existing direct regression approach. The proposed method shows good performance on many existing public datasets. The proposed method also demonstrates good results on the unseen dataset without getting trained on it, which validates the approach’s generalization ability.