DITS: A New Domain Independent Text Spotter
摘要
Text spotting in diverse domains, such as drone-captured images, underwater scenes, and natural scene images, presents unique challenges due to variations in image quality, contrast, text appearance, background complexity, and external factors like water surface reflections and weather conditions. While most existing approaches focus on text spotting in natural scene images, we propose a Domain-Independent Text Spotter (DITS) that effectively handles multiple domains. We innovatively combine the Real-ESRGAN, developed for regular image enhancement, with the DeepSolo, developed for scene text spotting, in an end-to-end fashion for text detection and spotting on images of different domains. The key idea behind our approach is that improving image quality and text-spotting accuracy are complementary goals. Real-ESRGAN enhances image quality, making the text more discernible, while DeepSolo, a state-of-the-art text spotting model, accurately localizes and recognizes text in the enhanced images. We validate the superiority of our proposed model by evaluating it on datasets from drone, underwater, and scene domains (ICDAR 2015, CTW1500, and Total-Text). Furthermore, we demonstrate the domain independence of our model through cross-domain validation, where we train on one domain and test on others. Our dataset and code will be publicly available on GitHub.