Total-Text: toward orientation robustness in scene text detection

At present, text orientation is not diverse enough in the existing scene text datasets. Specifically, curve-orientated text is largely out-numbered by horizontal and multi-oriented text, hence, it has received minimal attention from the community so far. Motivated by this phenomenon, we collected a new scene text dataset, Total-Text , which emphasized on text orientations diversity. It is the first relatively large scale scene text dataset that features three different text orientations: horizontal, multi-oriented, and curve-oriented. In addition, we also study several other important elements such as the practicality and quality of ground truth, evaluation protocol, and the annotation process. We believe that these elements are as important as the images and ground truth to facilitate a new research direction. Secondly, we propose a new scene text detection model as the baseline for Total-Text, namely Polygon-Faster-RCNN , and demonstrated its ability to detect text of all orientations. Images of Total-Text and its annotation are available at https://github.com/cs-chan/Total-Text-Dataset .