PCBSNet: A Pure Convolutional Bilateral Segmentation Network for Real-Time Natural Scene Text Detection

Abstract

Scene text detection is a fundamental research work in the field of image processing and has extensive application value. Segmentation-based methods have time-consuming feature processing, while post-processing algorithms are excellent. Real-time semantic segmentation methods use lightweight backbone networks for feature extraction and aggregation but lack effective post-processing methods. The pure convolutional network improves model performance by changing key components. Combining the advantages of three types of methods, we propose a Pure Convolutional Bilateral Segmentation Network (PCBSNet) for real-time natural scene text detection. First, we constructed a bilateral feature extraction backbone network to significantly improve detection speed. The low extraction detail branch captures spatial information, while the efficient semantic extraction branch accurately captures semantic features through a series of micro designs. Second, we built an efficient attention aggregation module to guide the efficient and adaptive aggregation of features from the two branches. The fused feature map undergoes feature enhancement to obtain more accurate and reliable feature representation. Finally, we used differentiable binarization post-processing to construct text instance boundaries. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model, we compared it with mainstream lightweight models on three datasets: ICDAR2015, MSRA-TD500, and CTW1500. The F-measure scores were 82.9%, 82.8%, and 78.9%, respectively, and the FPS were 59.1, 94.3, and 75.5 frames per second. We also conducted extensive ablation experiments on the ICDAR2015 dataset to validate the rationality of the proposed improvements. The obtained results indicate that the proposed model significantly improves inference speed while enhancing accuracy and demonstrates good competitiveness compared to other advanced detection methods. However, when faced with curved text, the detection performance of PCBSNet needs to be improved.