  Recently, segmentation-based methods are quite popular in scene text
detection, as the segmentation results can more accurately describe scene text
of various shapes such as curve text. However, the post-processing of
binarization is essential for segmentation-based detection, which converts
probability maps produced by a segmentation method into bounding boxes/regions
of text. In this paper, we propose a module named Differentiable Binarization
(DB), which can perform the binarization process in a segmentation network.
Optimized along with a DB module, a segmentation network can adaptively set the
thresholds for binarization, which not only simplifies the post-processing but
also enhances the performance of text detection. Based on a simple segmentation
network, we validate the performance improvements of DB on five benchmark
datasets, which consistently achieves state-of-the-art results, in terms of
both detection accuracy and speed. In particular, with a light-weight backbone,
the performance improvements by DB are significant so that we can look for an
ideal tradeoff between detection accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, with a
backbone of ResNet-18, our detector achieves an F-measure of 82.8, running at
62 FPS, on the MSRA-TD500 dataset. Code is available at:
https://github.com/MhLiao/DB
