This is a modified SSD model for text detection.
Compared to faster R-CNN, SSD is much faster. In my expriment, SSD only needs about 0.05s for each image.
This is a re-implementation of mxnet SSD. The official repository is available here. The arXiv paper is available here.
- Build MXNet: Make sure the extra operators for this example is enabled, and please following the the official instructions here.
I modify the original SSD on SynthText and ICDAR. Other datasets should
be easily supported by adding subclass derived from class Imdb
in dataset/imdb.py
.
See example of dataset/pascal_voc.py
for details.
- Download the converted pretrained
vgg16_reduced
model here, unzip.param
and.json
files intomodel/
directory by default.
To gain a good performance, we should train our model on SynthText which is a quite big dataset (about 40G) firstly, and then fine tune this model on ICDAR. If you want to apply this model for other applications, you can fine tune it on any dataset.
- Download the SynthText dataset here, and extract it into
data
.
Because SSD requires every image's size but SythText is too big, it will take too much time if we have to use opencv to read the images' size each time when we star training. So I use 'read_size.py' (data/synthtext_img_size
) to creat a h5py file 'size.h5' to store the sizes of all images. You can copy this file to the extracted folder 'SynthText'.
- Start training:
python train_synthtext.py
-
Download the ICDAR challenge 2 dataset here, and extract it into
data
. -
Start training:
python train_icdar.py --finetune N
Please replace 'N' into an integer number which depends on the save model you train on SynthText.
- After training, you can try your model on test images. I give two demos here (
demo.py
anddemo_savefig.py
).demo.py
can visualize the detection result, whiledemo_savefig.py
can save the detection result as images.
When running demo_savefig.py
, please give the test images path.
- Run
demo.py
# play with examples:
python demo.py --epoch 0 --images ./data/demo/test.jpg --thresh 0.5
- Check
python demo.py --help
for more options.
When running demo_savefig.py
, please give the test images folder path.
- Run
demo_savefig.py
# play with examples:
python demo_savefig.py --epoch 0 --images ./data/demo/test --thresh 0.5