HTSTL: Head-and-Tail Search Network With Scale-Transfer Layer for Traffic Sign Text Detection

Although promising results have been achieved in the area of traffic sign detection, little attention has been paid to text detection on traffic signs. In fact, in today's popular driver-less automobile industry, traffic sign text which brings abundant and valuable traffic information plays an important and indispensable role. In this work, we design an effective detector for traffic sign text, whose pipeline only consists of a preprocessing module to tackle with some complex situations, a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) in which a Scale-transfer layer is proposed to speed up the network and a simple post-processing step. Extensive experiments on the Chinese traffic sign text dataset (CTST-1600), ICDAR 2013 and MSRA-TD500 show that the proposed method has achieved the state-of-the-art results, which proves the ability of our detector on both particularity and universality applications. We collect the Chinese text-based traffic sign dataset named CTST-1600, and it can be found at https://github.com/pummi823/test/blob/master/CTST-1600.