MFECN: Multi-level Feature Enhanced Cumulative Network for Scene Text Detection

Recently, many scene text detection algorithms have achieved impressive performance by using convolutional neural networks. However, most of them do not make full use of the context among the hierarchical multi-level features to improve the performance of scene text detection. In this article, we present an efficient multi-level features enhanced cumulative framework based on instance segmentation for scene text detection. At first, we adopt a Multi-Level Features Enhanced Cumulative (MFEC) module to capture features of cumulative enhancement of representational ability. Then, a Multi-Level Features Fusion (MFF) module is designed to fully integrate both high-level and low-level MFEC features, which can adaptively encode scene text information. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we perform experiments on six public datasets (namely, CTW1500, Total-text, MSRA-TD500, ICDAR2013, ICDAR2015, and MLT2017), and make comparisons with other state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed Multi-Level Features Enhanced Cumulative Network (MFECN) detector can well handle scene text instances with irregular shapes (i.e., curved, oriented, and horizontal) and achieves better or comparable results.