In the context of Internet of Things (IoT) deployments, edge nodes are commonly constrained by limited computational and storage resources, posing resource constraints as a key challenge in edge deployment strategies. Graph knowledge distillation (GKD) effectively extracts and transfers knowledge from large teacher models, enabling model compression and performance enhancement. This provides robust solutions for edge deployments in applications, such as autonomous driving systems, real-time fault detection, and wearable sensors. Nevertheless, current GKD methods have limitations in fully exploiting the multiscale information and deep feature potential of the networks, limiting the improvement of distillation performance. Therefore, we propose a novel graph neural network distillation method based on multiscale fractal feature extraction, termed box aggregation distillation (BAD). BAD divide the network into boxes based on different scales and aggregates features of the nodes within the box to extract the deep structure information. Furthermore, we introduced the Box Aggregation Loss to quantify the differences in intermediate layers between the two models. By minimizing this disparity, we effectively transfer multiscale and deep network knowledge from the teacher model. Experimental results indicate that the BAD method improves the F1 score by 0.51% to 5.83% compared to baseline methods while maintaining model compression. Additionally, it accelerates convergence speed during the warm-up phase by at least 2.96%.

Arbitrary-shaped text detection in natural images is a challenging task due to the complexity of the background and the diversity of text properties. The difficulty lies in two aspects: accurate separation of adjacent texts and sufficient text feature representation. To handle these problems, we consider text detection as instance segmentation and propose a novel text detection framework, which jointly learns semantic segmentation and a pixel affinity pyramid in a unified fully convolutional network. Specifically, the pixel affinity pyramid is proposed to encode multi-scale instance affiliation relationships of pixels, which is not only robust to varying shapes of text but also provides an accurate boundary description for separating closely located texts. In the inference phase, a simple but effective post-processing is presented to reconstruct text instances from the semantic segmentation results under the guidance of the learned pixel affinity pyramid, achieving good accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, to enhance the representation of text features in the neural network, two modules — the Region Enhancement Module (REM) and Attentional Fusion Module (AFM) — are proposed. The REM models the semantic correlations of regional features to enhance the features from the text area, which effectively suppresses false-positive detection. The AFM adaptively fuses multi-scale textual information through an attention mechanism to obtain abundant text semantic features, which benefits multi-sized text detection. Extensive ablation experiments are conducted demonstrating the effectiveness of the REM and AFM. Evaluation results on standard benchmarks, including Total-Text, ICDAR2015, SCUT-CTW1500, and MSRA-TD500, show that our method surpasses most existing text detectors and achieves state-of-the-art performance, denoting its superior capability in detecting arbitrary-shaped texts.

Nowadays, it is a trend that using a parallel-decoupled encoder-decoder (PDED) framework in scene text recognition for its flexibility and efficiency. However, due to the inconsistent information content between queries and keys in the parallel positional attention module (PPAM) used in this kind of framework(queries: position information, keys: context and position information), visual misalignment tends to appear when confronting hard samples(e.g., blurred texts, irregular texts, or low-quality images). To tackle this issue, in this paper, we propose a dual parallel attention network (DPAN), in which a newly designed parallel context attention module (PCAM) is cascaded with the original PPAM, using linguistic contextual information to compensate for the information inconsistency between queries and keys. Specifically, in PCAM, we take the visual features from PPAM as inputs and present a bidirectional language model to enhance them with linguistic contexts to produce queries. In this way, we make the information content of the queries and keys consistent in PCAM, which helps to generate more precise visual glimpses to improve the entire PDED framework's accuracy and robustness. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed PCAM, showing the necessity of keeping the information consistency between queries and keys in the attention mechanism. On six benchmarks, including regular text and irregular text, the performance of DPAN surpasses the existing leading methods by large margins, achieving new state-of-the-art performance. The code is available on \urlhttps://github.com/Jackandrome/DPAN.

This paper introduces a novel bi-directional con-volutional framework to cope with the large-variance scale problem in scene text detection. Due to the lack of scale normalization in recent CNN-based methods, text instances with large-variance scale are activated inconsistently in feature maps, which makes it hard for CNN-based methods to accurately locate multi-size text instances. Thus, we propose the relationship network (R-Net) that maps multi-scale convolutional features to a scale-invariant space to obtain consistent activation of multi-size text instances. Firstly, we implement an FPN-like backbone with a Spatial Relationship Module (SPM) to extract multi-scale features with powerful spatial semantics. Then, a Scale Relationship Module (SRM) constructed on feature pyramid propagates contextual scale information in sequential features through a bi-directional convolutional operation. SRM supplements the multi-scale information in different feature maps to obtain consistent activation of multi-size text instances. Compared with previous approaches, R-Net effectively handles the large-variance scale problem without complicated post processing and complex hand-crafted hyperparameter setting. Extensive experiments conducted on several benchmarks verify that our R-Net obtains state-of-the-art performance on both accuracy and efficiency. More specifically, R-Net achieves an F-measure of 85.6% at 21.4 frames/s and an F-measure of 81.7% at 11.8 frames/s for ICDAR 2015 and MSRA-TD500 datasets respectively, which is the latest SOTA. The code is available on https://github.com/wangyuxin87/R-Net.

Scene text detection has witnessed rapid development in recent years. However, there still exists two main challenges: 1) many methods suffer from false positives in their text representations; 2) the large scale variance of scene texts makes it hard for network to learn samples. In this paper, we propose the ContourNet, which effectively handles these two problems taking a further step toward accurate arbitrary-shaped text detection. At first, a scale-insensitive Adaptive Region Proposal Network (Adaptive-RPN) is proposed to generate text proposals by only focusing on the Intersection over Union (IoU) values between predicted and ground-truth bounding boxes. Then a novel Local Orthogonal Texture-aware Module (LOTM) models the local texture information of proposal features in two orthogonal directions and represents text region with a set of contour points. Considering that the strong unidirectional or weakly orthogonal activation is usually caused by the monotonous texture characteristic of false-positive patterns (e.g. streaks.), our method effectively suppresses these false positives by only outputting predictions with high response value in both orthogonal directions. This gives more accurate description of text regions. Extensive experiments on three challenging datasets (Total-Text, CTW1500 and ICDAR2015) verify that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/wangyuxin87/ContourNet.

Nowadays, scene text detection has become increasingly important and popular. However, the large variance of text scale remains the main challenge and limits the detection performance in most previous methods. To address this problem, we propose an end-to-end architecture called Deep Scale Relationship Network (DSRN) to map multi-scale convolution features onto a scale invariant space to obtain uniform activation of multi-size text instances. Firstly, we develop a Scale-transfer module to transfer the multi-scale feature maps to a unified dimension. Due to the heterogeneity of features, simply concatenating feature maps with multi-scale information would limit the detection performance. Thus we propose a Scale Relationship module to aggregate the multi-scale information through bi-directional convolution operations. Finally, to further reduce the miss-detected instances, a novel Recall Loss is proposed to force the network to concern more about miss-detected text instances by up-weighting poor-classified examples. Compared with previous approaches, DSRN efficiently handles the large-variance scale problem without complex hand-crafted hyperparameter settings (e.g. scale of default boxes) and complicated post processing. On standard datasets including ICDAR2015 and MSRA-TD500, the proposed algorithm achieves the state-of-art performance with impressive speed (8.8 FPS on ICDAR2015 and 13.3 FPS on MSRA-TD500).

Deep neural network (DNN) can extract high-dimensional feature of images for computer vision tasks including Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images classification. However, OCT images are usually processed by DNN just like natural images, thus the performance of DNN is not satisfactory. We present an end-to-end DNN targeting OCT images classification. Considering the characteristic of OCT images, we introduce attention mechanism into classifier to extract more specific feature of OCT images. Our network demonstrates its capacity to enhance the features that represent the disease region. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance with average accuracy of 99.5% and F1-score of 0.995 on the OCT images dataset.