  In this paper, we introduce a novel end-end framework for multi-oriented
scene text detection from an instance-aware semantic segmentation perspective.
We present Fused Text Segmentation Networks, which combine multi-level features
during the feature extracting as text instance may rely on finer feature
expression compared to general objects. It detects and segments the text
instance jointly and simultaneously, leveraging merits from both semantic
segmentation task and region proposal based object detection task. Not
involving any extra pipelines, our approach surpasses the current state of the
art on multi-oriented scene text detection benchmarks: ICDAR2015 Incidental
Scene Text and MSRA-TD500 reaching Hmean 84.1% and 82.0% respectively. Morever,
we report a baseline on total-text containing curved text which suggests
effectiveness of the proposed approach.
