Robust Text Line Detection in Equipment Nameplate Images*

Scene text detection for equipment nameplates in the wild is important for equipment inspection robot since it enables inspection robot to take specific actions for different equipment’s. Although text detection in images has achieved great progress in recent years, the detection for equipment nameplates faces several challenges such as extreme illumination and distortion which significantly decrease the detection performance. In this paper, we propose a deep text detection model Robust Text Line Detection (RTLD) for locating word level text instances in equipment cards. Specifically, the proposed model first employs a corner detection module to determine the four corner points of each nameplate, and then a carefully designed image transformed module transforms the irregular nameplate region into a rectangular region. Finally, text detection module is introduced to locate every word level text instance in the transformed images. We conduct extensive experiments to examine our proposed methods on real equipment nameplate images. Our model achieves 91.2% precision and 92.6% recall on Equipment Nameplate Dataset. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our models.