  Scene text detection and document layout analysis have long been treated as
two separate tasks in different image domains. In this paper, we bring them
together and introduce the task of unified scene text detection and layout
analysis. The first hierarchical scene text dataset is introduced to enable
this novel research task. We also propose a novel method that is able to
simultaneously detect scene text and form text clusters in a unified way.
Comprehensive experiments show that our unified model achieves better
performance than multiple well-designed baseline methods. Additionally, this
model achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple scene text detection
datasets without the need of complex post-processing. Dataset and code:
https://github.com/google-research-datasets/hiertext and
https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/official/projects/unified_detector.
