text: Most text detection methods hypothesize texts are horizontal or multi-oriented and thus define quadrangles as the basic detection unit. However, text in the wild is usually perspectively distorted or curved, which can not be easily tackled by existing approaches. In this paper, we propose a deep character embedding network (CENet) which simultaneously predicts the bounding boxes of characters and their embedding vectors, thus making text detection a simple clustering task in the character embedding space. The proposed method does not require strong assumptions of forming a straight line on general text detection, which provides flexibility on arbitrarily curved or perspectively distorted text. For character detection task, a dense prediction subnetwork is designed to obtain the confidence score and bounding boxes of characters. For character embedding task, a subnet is trained with contrastive loss to project detected characters into embedding space. The two tasks share a backbone CNN from which the multi-scale feature maps are extracted. The final text regions can be easily achieved by a thresholding process on character confidence and embedding distance of character pairs. We evaluated our method on ICDAR13, ICDAR15, MSRA-TD500, and Total-Text. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art or comparable performance on all these datasets, and shows substantial improvement in the irregular-text datasets, i.e. Total-Text.
  @cite_30: 
  @cite_18: Despite significant recent advances in the field of face recognition [10, 14, 15, 17], implementing face verification and recognition efficiently at scale presents serious challenges to current approaches. In this paper we present a system, called FaceNet, that directly learns a mapping from face images to a compact Euclidean space where distances directly correspond to a measure of face similarity. Once this space has been produced, tasks such as face recognition, verification and clustering can be easily implemented using standard techniques with FaceNet embeddings as feature vectors.
  @cite_26: Relevant Component Analysis (RCA) has been proposed for learning distance metrics with contextual constraints for image retrieval. However, RCA has two important disadvantages. One is the lack of exploiting negative constraints which can also be informative, and the other is its incapability of capturing complex nonlinear relationships between data instances with the contextual information. In this paper, we propose two algorithms to overcome these two disadvantages, i.e., Discriminative Component Analysis (DCA) and Kernel DCA. Compared with other complicated methods for distance metric learning, our algorithms are rather simple to understand and very easy to solve. We evaluate the performance of our algorithms on image retrieval in which experimental results show that our algorithms are effective and promising in learning good quality distance metrics for image retrieval.
  @cite_4: The modern image search system requires semantic understanding of image, and a key yet under-addressed problem is to learn a good metric for measuring the similarity between images. While deep metric learning has yielded impressive performance gains by extracting high level abstractions from image data, a proper objective loss function becomes the central issue to boost the performance. In this paper, we propose a novel angular loss, which takes angle relationship into account, for learning better similarity metric. Whereas previous metric learning methods focus on optimizing the similarity (contrastive loss) or relative similarity (triplet loss) of image pairs, our proposed method aims at constraining the angle at the negative point of triplet triangles. Several favorable properties are observed when compared with conventional methods. First, scale invariance is introduced, improving the robustness of objective against feature variance. Second, a third-order geometric constraint is inherently imposed, capturing additional local structure of triplet triangles than contrastive loss or triplet loss. Third, better convergence has been demonstrated by experiments on three publicly available datasets.
  @cite_7: State-of-the-art object detection networks depend on region proposal algorithms to hypothesize object locations. Advances like SPPnet [7] and Fast R-CNN [5] have reduced the running time of these detection networks, exposing region proposal computation as a bottleneck. In this work, we introduce a Region Proposal Network (RPN) that shares full-image convolutional features with the detection network, thus enabling nearly cost-free region proposals. An RPN is a fully-convolutional network that simultaneously predicts object bounds and objectness scores at each position. RPNs are trained end-to-end to generate high-quality region proposals, which are used by Fast R-CNN for detection. With a simple alternating optimization, RPN and Fast R-CNN can be trained to share convolutional features. For the very deep VGG-16 model [19], our detection system has a frame rate of 5fps (including all steps) on a GPU, while achieving state-of-the-art object detection accuracy on PASCAL VOC 2007 (73.2 mAP) and 2012 (70.4 mAP) using 300 proposals per image. Code is available at https: github.com ShaoqingRen faster_rcnn.
  @cite_3: We present a method for training a similarity metric from data. The method can be used for recognition or verification applications where the number of categories is very large and not known during training, and where the number of training samples for a single category is very small. The idea is to learn a function that maps input patterns into a target space such that the L sub 1 norm in the target space approximates the "semantic" distance in the input space. The method is applied to a face verification task. The learning process minimizes a discriminative loss function that drives the similarity metric to be small for pairs of faces from the same person, and large for pairs from different persons. The mapping from raw to the target space is a convolutional network whose architecture is designed for robustness to geometric distortions. The system is tested on the Purdue AR face database which has a very high degree of variability in the pose, lighting, expression, position, and artificial occlusions such as dark glasses and obscuring scarves.
  @cite_39: This paper addresses the problems of word spotting and word recognition on images. In word spotting, the goal is to find all instances of a query word in a dataset of images. In recognition, the goal is to recognize the content of the word image, usually aided by a dictionary or lexicon. We describe an approach in which both word images and text strings are embedded in a common vectorial subspace. This is achieved by a combination of label embedding and attributes learning, and a common subspace regression. In this subspace, images and strings that represent the same word are close together, allowing one to cast recognition and retrieval tasks as a nearest neighbor problem. Contrary to most other existing methods, our representation has a fixed length, is low dimensional, and is very fast to compute and, especially, to compare. We test our approach on four public datasets of both handwritten documents and natural images showing results comparable or better than the state-of-the-art on spotting and recognition tasks.
summary: The goal of metric learning or embedding methods @cite_3 @cite_18 @cite_4 is to learn a function that measures how similar two samples are. There are many successful applications of metric learning @cite_26 @cite_3 @cite_18 @cite_4 , such as ranking, image retrieval, face verification, speaker verification and so on. By far, applications of metric learning on document analysis or text reading were limited to the problem of word spotting and verification @cite_39 @cite_7 @cite_30 . In this work, we verify the effectiveness of deep metric learning in text detection task. Based on character candidates, we provide an end-to-end trainable network that can output the character bounding boxes and their embedding vectors simultaneously. Text regions could be easily detected by grouping characters which embedding distances are small.