S3INet: Semantic-Information Space Sharing Interaction Network for Arbitrary Shape Text Detection

The detecting arbitrary shape text is a challenging task due to the significant variation in text shape, size, and aspect ratio, as well as the complexity of scene backgrounds. The enhancing feature extraction capabilities is essential for the boosting text detection accuracy. However, traditional text feature extraction methods face several issues, including insufficient multiscale feature fusion, limited information transfer between different feature levels, and constrained receptive field expansion when using asymmetric convolutional kernels for long text detection. To address these challenges, this article introduces an arbitrarily shaped scene text detector called the semantic-information space sharing interaction network (S3INet). The proposed network leverages the semantic-information space sharing module (S3M) to generate a single-level feature map capable of capturing multiscale features with rich semantic information and prominent foreground elements. In addition, we propose the multibranch parallel asymmetric convolutional module (MPACM) group to enhance the representation of text features, thereby further enhancing text detection performance. Extensive experimental evaluations on five publicly available natural scene text datasets (CTW-1500, Total-Text, MSRA-TD500, ICDAR2015, and ICDAR2017-MLT) and two traffic text datasets (CTST-1600 and TPD) demonstrate the superiority of our method. The results indicate that S3INet significantly outperforms most existing state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and robustness. The code will be released at: https://github.com/runminwang/S3INet.