An Improved Differentiable Binarization Network for Natural Scene Street Sign Text Detection

Abstract

The street sign text information from natural scenes usually exists in a complex background environment and is affected by natural light and artificial light. However, most of the current text detection algorithms do not effectively reduce the influence of light and do not make full use of the relationship between high-level semantic information and contextual semantic information in the feature extraction network when extracting features from images, and they are ineffective at detecting text in complex backgrounds. To solve these problems, we first propose a multi-channel MSER (Maximally Stable Extreme Regions) method to fully consider color information in text detection, which separates the text area in the image from the complex background, effectively reducing the influence of the complex background and light on street sign text detection. We also propose an enhanced feature pyramid network text detection method, which includes a feature pyramid route enhancement (FPRE) module and a high-level feature enhancement (HLFE) module. The two modules can make full use of the network’s low-level and high-level semantic information to enhance the network’s effectiveness in localizing text information and detecting text with different shapes, sizes, and inclined text. Experiments showed that the F-scores obtained by the method proposed in this paper on ICDAR 2015 (International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition 2015) dataset, ICDAR2017-MLT (International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition 2017- Competition on Multi-lingual scene text detection) dataset, and the Natural Scene Street Signs (NSSS) dataset constructed in this study are 89.5%, 84.5%, and 73.3%, respectively, which confirmed the performance advantage of the method proposed in street sign text detection.