CE-text: A context-Aware and embedded text detector in natural scene images

With the significant power of deep learning architectures, researchers have made much progress on effectiveness and efficiency of text detection in the past few years. However, due to the lack of consideration of unique characteristics of text components, directly applying deep learning models to perform text detection task is prone to result in low accuracy, especially producing false positive detection results. To ease this problem, we propose a lightweight and context-aware deep convolutional neural network (CNN) named as CE-Text, which appropriately encodes multi-level channel attention information to construct discriminative feature map for accurate and efficient text detection. To fit with low computation resource of embedded systems, we further transform CE-Text into a lighter version with a frequency based deep CNN compression method, which expands applicable scenarios of CE-Text into variant embedded systems. Experiments on several popular datasets show that CE-Text not only has achieved accurate text detection results in scene images, but also could run with fast performance in embedded systems. (C) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.