Tracking based multi-orientation scene text detection: A unified framework with dynamic programming

Abstract

There are a variety of grand challenges for multiorientation text detection in scene videos, where the typical issues include skew distortion, low contrast, and arbitrary motion. Most conventional video text detection methods using individual frames have limited performance. In this paper, we propose a novel tracking based multi-orientation scene text detection method using multiple frames within a unified framework via dynamic programming. First, a multi-information fusion-based multi-orientation text detection method in each frame is proposed to extensively locate possible character candidates and extract text regions with multiple channels and scales. Second, an optimal tracking trajectory is learned and linked globally over consecutive frames by dynamic programming to finally refine the detection results with all detection, recognition, and prediction information. Moreover, the effectiveness of our proposed system is evaluated with the state-of-the-art performances on several public data sets of multi-orientation scene text images and videos, including MSRA-TD500, USTB-SV1K, and ICDAR 2015 Scene Videos.