A Novel Text Structure Feature Extractor for Chinese Scene Text Detection and Recognition

Scene text information extraction plays an important role in many computer vision applications. Most features in existing text extraction algorithms are only applicable to one text extraction stage (text detection or recognition), which significantly weakens the consistency in an end-to-end system, especially for the complex Chinese texts. To tackle this challenging problem, we propose a novel text structure feature extractor based on a text structure component detector (TSCD) layer and residual network for Chinese texts. Inspired by the three-layer Chinese text cognition model of a human, we combine the TSCD layer and the residual network to extract features suitable for both text extraction stages. The specialized modeling for Chinese characters in the TSCD layer simulates the key structure component cognition layer in the psychological model. And the residual mechanism in the residual network simulates the key bidirectional connection among the layers in the psychological model. Through the organic combination of the TSCD layer and the residual network, the extracted features are applicable to both text detection and recognition, as humans do. In evaluation, both text detection and recognition models based on our proposed text structure feature extractor achieve great improvements over baseline CNN models. And an end-to-end Chinese text information extraction system is experimentally designed and evaluated, showing the advantage of the proposed feature extractor as a unified feature extractor.