  We propose an end-to-end trainable network that can simultaneously detect and
recognize text of arbitrary shape, making substantial progress on the open
problem of reading scene text of irregular shape. We formulate arbitrary shape
text detection as an instance segmentation problem; an attention model is then
used to decode the textual content of each irregularly shaped text region
without rectification. To extract useful irregularly shaped text instance
features from image scale features, we propose a simple yet effective RoI
masking step. Additionally, we show that predictions from an existing
multi-step OCR engine can be leveraged as partially labeled training data,
which leads to significant improvements in both the detection and recognition
accuracy of our model. Our method surpasses the state-of-the-art for end-to-end
recognition tasks on the ICDAR15 (straight) benchmark by 4.6%, and on the
Total-Text (curved) benchmark by more than 16%.
