FREE: A Fast and Robust End-to-End Video Text Spotter

Currently, video text spotting tasks usually fall into the four-staged pipeline: detecting text regions in individual images, recognizing localized text regions frame-wisely, tracking text streams and post-processing to generate final results. However, they may suffer from the huge computational cost as well as sub-optimal results due to the interferences of low-quality text and the none-trainable pipeline strategy. In this article, we propose a fast and robust end-to-end video text spotting framework named FREE by only recognizing the localized text stream one-time instead of frame-wise recognition. Specifically, FREE first employs a well-designed spatial-temporal detector that learns text locations among video frames. Then a novel text recommender is developed to select the highest-quality text from text streams for recognizing. Here, the recommender is implemented by assembling text tracking, quality scoring and recognition into a trainable module. It not only avoids the interferences from the low-quality text but also dramatically speeds up the video text spotting. FREE unites the detector and recommender into a whole framework, and helps achieve global optimization. Besides, we collect a large scale video text dataset for promoting the video text spotting community, containing 100 videos from 21 real-life scenarios. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks show our method greatly speeds up the text spotting process, and also achieves the remarkable state-of-the-art.