An improved text detection model in image

Image Text Detection is the process of accurately locating text area in given images, which is the important prerequisite of OCR (Optical Character Recognition). This paper introduces Improved IEAST (Improved EAST) which is an efficient and accurate scene text detection model based on deep neural network. This model which combines the knowledge of both object detection and instance segmentation is a variant of EAST (An Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector) with several improvements. By replacing conv3x3 feature merging with inception module, adding the idea of Path Aggregation and adopting Fuzzy Mask during training, IEAST gains improvements in performance with little compensation. Though IEAST is a one-stage model, it outperforms most of state-of-the-art two-stage text detection models by not only maintaining comparable accuracy but also inferencing faster. IEAST shows good result on ICDAR (International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition) 2015 dataset