Towards Accurate Video Text Spotting with Text-wise Semantic Reasoning

Video text spotting (VTS) aims at extracting texts from videos, where text detection, tracking and recognition are conducted simultaneously. There have been some works that can tackle VTS; however, they may ignore the underlying semantic relationships among texts within a frame. We observe that the texts within a frame usually share similar semantics, which suggests that, if one text is predicted incorrectly by a text recognizer, it still has a chance to be corrected via semantic reasoning. In this paper, we propose an accurate video text spotter, VLSpotter, that reads texts visually, linguistically, and semantically. For ‘visually’, we propose a plug-and-play text-focused super-resolution module to alleviate motion blur and enhance video quality. For ‘linguistically’, a language model is employed to capture intra-text context to mitigate wrongly spelled text predictions. For ‘semantically’, we propose a text-wise semantic reasoning module to model inter-text semantic relationships and reason for better results. The experimental results on multiple VTS benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed VLSpotter outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods in end-to-end video text spotting.