Title: Detecting Oriented Text in Natural Images by Linking Segments,
Abstract: Most state-of-the-art text detection methods are specific to horizontal Latin
text and are not fast enough for real-time applications. We introduce Segment
Linking (SegLink), an oriented text detection method. The main idea is to
decompose text into two locally detectable elements, namely segments and links.
A segment is an oriented box covering a part of a word or text line; A link
connects two adjacent segments, indicating that they belong to the same word or
text line. Both elements are detected densely at multiple scales by an
end-to-end trained, fully-convolutional neural network. Final detections are
produced by combining segments connected by links. Compared with previous
methods, SegLink improves along the dimensions of accuracy, speed, and ease of
training. It achieves an f-measure of 75.0% on the standard ICDAR 2015
Incidental (Challenge 4) benchmark, outperforming the previous best by a large
margin. It runs at over 20 FPS on 512x512 images. Moreover, without
modification, SegLink is able to detect long lines of non-Latin text, such as
Chinese.