Swapping text in scene images while preserving original fonts, colors, sizes and background textures is a challenging task due to the complex interplay between different factors. In this work, we present SwapText, a three-stage framework to transfer texts across scene images. First, a novel text swapping network is proposed to replace text labels only in the foreground image. Second, a background completion network is learned to reconstruct background images. Finally, the generated foreground image and background image are used to generate the word image by the fusion network. Using the proposing framework, we can manipulate the texts of the input images even with severe geometric distortion. Qualitative and quantitative results are presented on several scene text datasets, including regular and irregular text datasets. We conducted extensive experiments to prove the usefulness of our method such as image based text translation, text image synthesis.

Scene text recognition has attracted increasing attention in computer vision due to its various applications. Most of the existing scene text recognition methods are under the encoder-decoder framework. In order to improve text feature learning of these methods, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are recently integrated to generate clean text images without distorted letters. However, the existing GANs assume the input images are spatially aligned, while the words in natural images are often in irregular shapes. The misalignment brings a big problem for both image generation and text recognition. In this paper, we present a novel text feature alignment network to solve this problem. Our method can handle both horizontal and vertical images with irregular texts. Our proposed framework is end-to-end trainable, and extensive experiments on several public benchmarks demonstrate its superiority in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.

Incidental scene text detection, especially for multi-oriented text regions, is one of the most challenging tasks in many computer vision applications.Different from the common object detection task, scene text often suffers from a large variance of aspect ratio, scale, and orientation. To solve this problem, we propose a novel end-to-end scene text detector IncepText from an instance-aware segmentation perspective. We design a novel Inception-Text module and introduce deformable PSROI pooling to deal with multi-oriented text detection. Extensive experiments on ICDAR2015, RCTW-17, and MSRA-TD500 datasets demonstrate our method's superiority in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. Our proposed method achieves 1st place result on ICDAR2015 challenge and the state-of-the-art performance on other datasets. Moreover, we have released our implementation as an OCR product which is available for public access.