Elite Loss for scene text detection

Abstract

Many scene text detection approaches generate foreground segmentation maps to detect the text instances. In these methods, usually all the pixels within the bounding box regions of the text are equally treated as foreground during the training process. However, different from the general object segmentation problem, we argue that not all the pixels across the text bounding box region contribute equally for locating the text instance. Specifically, some in-box not-on-stroke pixels even degrade the detection performance. Moreover, for the segmentation based methods with a regression step applied to predict the corresponding bounding box on each pixel, not all the pixels need to be fully trained to predict foreground texts. Therefore, in this paper, we propose Elite Loss, which is intended to down-weight the contributions of the in-box not-on-stoke pixels while paying more attention to the on-stoke pixels. Furthermore, we design a segmentation-based method to validate the effectiveness of the proposed Elite Loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our methods achieve the state-of-the-art results on all three challenging datasets, with the F-score of 0.855 on ICDAR2015, 0.425 on COCO-Text, and 0.819 on MSRA-TD500.