Robust Scene Text Detection for Partially Annotated Training Data

This article analyzed the impact of training data containing un-annotated text instances, i.e., partial annotation in scene text detection, and proposed a text region refinement approach to address it. Scene text detection is a problem that has attracted the attention of the research community for decades. Impressive results have been obtained for fully supervised scene text detection with recent deep learning approaches. These approaches, however, need a vast amount of completely labeled datasets, and the creation of such datasets is a challenging and time-consuming task. Research literature lacks the analysis of the partial annotation of training data for scene text detection. We have found that the performance of the generic scene text detection method drops significantly due to the partial annotation of training data. We have proposed a text region refinement method that provides robustness against the partially annotated training data in scene text detection. The proposed method works as a two-tier scheme. Text-probable regions are obtained in the first tier by applying hybrid loss that generates pseudo-labels to refine text regions in the second-tier during training. Extensive experiments have been conducted on a dataset generated from ICDAR 2015 by dropping the annotations with various drop rates and on a publicly available SVT dataset. The proposed method exhibits a significant improvement over the baseline and existing approaches for the partially annotated training data.