Sabesan Sivapalan

Osman Tursun, Simon Denman, Rui Zeng et al.

A precise, controllable, interpretable and easily trainable text removal approach is necessary for both user-specific and large-scale text removal applications. To achieve this, we propose a one-stage mask-based text inpainting network, MTRNet++. It has a novel architecture that includes mask-refine, coarse-inpainting and fine-inpainting branches, and attention blocks. With this architecture, MTRNet++ can remove text either with or without an external mask. It achieves state-of-the-art results on both the Oxford and SCUT datasets without using external ground-truth masks. The results of ablation studies demonstrate that the proposed multi-branch architecture with attention blocks is effective and essential. It also demonstrates controllability and interpretability.

Osman Tursun, Rui Zeng, Simon Denman et al.

Text removal algorithms have been proposed for uni-lingual scripts with regular shapes and layouts. However, to the best of our knowledge, a generic text removal method which is able to remove all or user-specified text regions regardless of font, script, language or shape is not available. Developing such a generic text eraser for real scenes is a challenging task, since it inherits all the challenges of multi-lingual and curved text detection and inpainting. To fill this gap, we propose a mask-based text removal network (MTRNet). MTRNet is a conditional adversarial generative network (cGAN) with an auxiliary mask. The introduced auxiliary mask not only makes the cGAN a generic text eraser, but also enables stable training and early convergence on a challenging large-scale synthetic dataset, initially proposed for text detection in real scenes. What's more, MTRNet achieves state-of-the-art results on several real-world datasets including ICDAR 2013, ICDAR 2017 MLT, and CTW1500, without being explicitly trained on this data, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods trained directly on these datasets.

Osman Tursun, Simon Denman, Sabesan Sivapalan et al.

The demand for large-scale trademark retrieval (TR) systems has significantly increased to combat the rise in international trademark infringement. Unfortunately, the ranking accuracy of current approaches using either hand-crafted or pre-trained deep convolution neural network (DCNN) features is inadequate for large-scale deployments. We show in this paper that the ranking accuracy of TR systems can be significantly improved by incorporating hard and soft attention mechanisms, which direct attention to critical information such as figurative elements and reduce attention given to distracting and uninformative elements such as text and background. Our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on a challenging large-scale trademark dataset.