GoMatching: A Simple Baseline for Video Text Spotting via Long and Short Term Matching

Beyond the text detection and recognition tasks in image text spotting, video text spotting presents an augmented challenge with the inclusion of tracking. While advanced end-to-end trainable methods have shown commendable performance, the pursuit of multi-task optimization may pose the risk of producing sub-optimal outcomes for individual tasks. In this paper, we identify a main bottleneck in the state-of-the-art video text spotter: the limited recognition capability. In response to this issue, we propose to efficiently turn an off-the-shelf query-based image text spotter into a specialist on video and present a simple baseline termed GoMatching, which focuses the training efforts on tracking while maintaining strong recognition performance. To adapt the image text spotter to video datasets, we add a rescoring head to rescore each detected instance's confidence via efficient tuning, leading to a better tracking candidate pool. Additionally, we design a long-short term matching module, termed LST-Matcher, to enhance the spotter's tracking capability by integrating both long- and short-term matching results via Transformer. Based on the above simple designs, GoMatching delivers new records on ICDAR15-video, DSText, BOVText, and our proposed novel test with arbitrary-shaped text termed ArTVideo, which demonstrates GoMatching's capability to accommodate general, dense, small, arbitrary-shaped, Chinese and English text scenarios while saving considerable training budgets.

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Peer review

Reviewer BgWx6/10 · confidence 5/52024-07-05

Summary

The paper introduces GoMatching, a streamlined and efficient baseline for video text spotting that enhances tracking capabilities through a novel Long-Short Term Matching module, while also setting new performance benchmarks on multiple datasets and introducing the ArTVideo test set for arbitrary-shaped text evaluation.

Strengths

1. This method leverages an off-the-shelf, query-based image text spotter and adapts it to video datasets through a focused training regimen on tracking while maintaining robust recognition performance. 2. A key component of GoMatching is the LST-Matcher, which enhances tracking capabilities by integrating both long-term and short-term matching results through a Transformer architecture. 3. The paper reports that GoMatching sets new records on multiple benchmark datasets, including ICDAR15-video, DSText, BOVText, and a newly proposed test set called ArTVideo, which features arbitrary-shaped text.

Weaknesses

1. The paper does not provide a corresponding share of inference time; the reviewer recommends that an analysis could be presented and compared with previous work (TransDETR). It is not a problem if the inference speed has not achieved state-of-the-art; such analysis can further support the paper. 2. The related ablation study only presents simple numerical comparisons of experimental results, which appear overly simplistic. More detailed analysis is necessary. It would be better if corresponding visual results comparisons could be provided if possible.

Questions

see weaknesses

Rating

6

Confidence

5

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

The reviewer did not see any discussion of limitations in the main text

Reviewer xYhx4/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-07

Summary

This work uses a query-based image text spotter for video text spotting to solve the poor recognition issue. To achieve this, they add a rescoring head to restore the confidence of detected text instances and use transformers to enhance the tracking capability in videos.

Strengths

1. Extend an image text-spotting mechanism to a video text-spotting scenario. 2. Introduce a rescoring mechanism to mitigate the domain gap between image and video datasets. 3. Long-short-term matching strategy to enhance the tracking capabilities. 4. An extensive experimental study has been provided.

Weaknesses

1. It is a generic comment that the recognition text in all the qualitative examples is not visible even with zooming in. Also, in the video they have been provided in the supplementary, I think there are some arbitrary shape text misrecognized. The description of the methodology section is too confusing. Thanks to the author for providing the code as supplementary to help me understand the work. 2. The input to the Image Text Spotter (i.e. DeepSolo) is a single frame, not multiple frames. Then what is the domain gap here? How the proposed rescoring algorithm solves the domain gap. I think this rescoring mechanism is for highlighting the small text. 3. It is also not clear to me how this technique works for multi-language settings (i.e. English and Chinese). In Deepsolo its completely dataset dependent. But here in Figure 4, in a single frame, the model can detect English as well as Chinese text. The mechanism of this multilingual OCR is not mentioned in the paper. 4. The motivation for expanding an image text spotter to a video text spotter is not clear to me. Especially when you are working with a single frame. On the other hand, there is a recent work on "End-to-End multi-view scene text recognition" (Pattern Recognition, 2024) which considers three views together to enhance the recognition performance.

Questions

1. Lack of motivation. 2. what is the domain gap between an image and a single video frame? 3. How to tackle multilingualism?

Rating

4

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

2

Contribution

2

Limitations

No there is no explicit mention of the limitations.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-11

We sincerely appreciate the reviewer's comments and would like to clarify the concept of domain gap in our work. **It is widely recognized that the domain gap can be referred to the differences in data distributions between the source and target domains, which can exist even when processing a single frame at a time**. The differences can arise due to variations in camera settings or other factors that affect the pixel distribution of the input data. Therefore, **the absence of a time factor does not negate the presence of a domain gap**. Besides, as we mentioned in Sec. 4.2 (Training Setting) of the paper, DeepSolo processes multiple frames at a time but not a single frame. During inference, it is a common practice that a tracking-by-detection method [1] or a tracking-by-query-propagation method [2] processes the video frame by frame, the same as we adopt in GoMatching. Finally, the existence of recent works on enhancing performance on blurry text does not negate the value of our proposed simple baseline. We provide the analysis on the main bottleneck of existing VTS methods, not only the recognition ability on blurry text, and the first solution that turns a ITS model into a VTS model at low cost. The substantial improvements on extensive video benchmarks support our simple yet effective designs. We hope the response can address your concern and would greatly appreciate it if the reviewer could provide further feedback. > [1] Global Tracking Transformers. CVPR, 2022. > [2] End-to-End Video Text Spotting with Transformer. IJCV, 2024.

Reviewer xYhx2024-08-13

Thanks for the response. However, it doesn't directly address my concern. The first paper they referred to isn't related to video text spotting and they are using multiple frames to analyze the connection to embedding learning and perform Re-identification of frames (section 4.5). The second paper is about video text spotting they also have a "Temporal Tracking Loss over Multiple Frames". There is no such thing in GoMatching which makes me confused. I asked in my reviews does the rescoring algorithm is used only for improvement over blurred texts. If yes, then which component keeps track of multiple frames? What is tracking the candidate pool? How it is created? The equations (2) and (3) obtained in the paper for long and short-term matching aren't well constructed for prediction and tracking. I didn't find any motivation to use those equations for tracking. Keeping all these in mind, I would like to keep my rating the same and ask the authors to simplify the method and rewrite the motivation with proper evidence.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-14

Our GoMatching adopts the tracking-by-detection paradigm. It involves two primary stages: 1) the detector (DeepSolo with rescoring mechanism) first provides the text spotting results for video frames; 2) the tracker (LST-Matcher) then associates these results across multiple frames to track for each text instances detected by the detector and form the trajectories. In the training phase, the LST-Matcher is exposed to multiple input frames in each batch, allowing it to learn the temporal relationships cross frames. During inference, we engage a memory bank to store the image text spotting results from multiple history frames provided by the detector, in the same way as [1]. The usage of memory bank enables the LST-Matcher to associate the detected text instances in current frame with the tracklets established in history frames (Sec. 3.3). As shown in the table provided in **A2**, the rescoring algorithm is used to adapt DeepSolo in video data domain, enhancing its text spotting ability in video data, not only for blurred texts. This enhancement improves the quality of detected text instances in memory bank (the tracking candidate pool), enabling the LST-matcher to achieve a better video text spotting results. Our LST-Matcher is built upon the similarity-based tracking with thresholded associatation scores. Equations (2) and (3) are employed to calculate distributions of the association scores (similarity scores) between the instance in current frame with the trajectories cross frames (two adjacent frames for short-term association in eq.(2) and multiple frames for long-term association in eq.(3)). These equations are used to optimize the log-likelihood in training phase, with the objective of maximizing the association scores of the identical instances cross frames while minimizing the association scores between different instances, as mentioned in Sec. 3.4. We will endeavor to revise the methodology section and make it easier to understand, as we committed in our first rebuttal. > [1] Global Tracking Transformers. CVPR, 2022.

Reviewer Lmjj6/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-11

Summary

This paper adopts the idea of tracking-by-detection and apply it in the task of video spotting. The proposed algorithm is built on top of a SOTA image text spotting model and the authors contributions lie in the tracking part. They design LST-Matcher to integrate both short-term and long-term matching results. Experiments on multiple real datasets show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art video spotting approach.

Strengths

S1. Applying the idea of tracking-by-detection in the task of video spotting is interesting and useful. S2. Experimental results are impressive.

Weaknesses

W1. The authors adopted a powerful image text spotting model Deepsolo and compared it with TransDETR. This may cause an issue that requires further investigation, i.e., how much performance improvement was brought by Deepsolo? In multi-object tracking, the performance of object detector plays an important role to the overall performance. Therefore, it becomes difficult to judge contributions brought by LST-Matcher. W2. Multi-object tracking is a very crowded research area. Obviously, the literature review in this paper missed a lot of recent works. My question is since there are so many works belonging to the category of tracking-by-detection, why the authors eventually choose the technical solution as in LST-Matcher? Can we adopt the idea of other works such as ByteTrack or its subsequent works? I noticed that TencentOCR incorporated ByteTrack and demonstrates better performance than GoMatching. W3. Following W2, TencentOCR exhibits better video text spotting results. So, what is the drawback of TencentOCR in real practice. Is it less efficient than GoMatching? W4. In TransDETR, detection results are also reported. It would be better to report the quality of detection task. Even though detection is not part of contributions in this paper, it still can help explain W1 to see the contributions brought by Deepsolo.

Questions

Please address the concerns in W1, W2, W3 and W4.

Rating

6

Confidence

3

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

2

Limitations

The authors failed to discuss the limitations of the work.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-10

We regret that our first response did not fully resolve your major concerns, and we try our best to address them as follows. The F-measure, which considers both Precision and Recall, is defined by the formula: $$ F-measure = 2 * \frac{Precison * Recall}{Precison + Recall}. $$ Due to the domain gap between the image data and video data, the original DeepSolo tends to provide lower confidence for text instances in video data. These low-confidence instances are more likely to be filtered out by the confidence threshold, resulting in a poor Recall and a sub-optimal F-measure. Our rescoring mechanism effectively adapts DeepSolo to the video domain at low cost, leading to **a 9.1% improvement on Recall and a 4.7% F-measure enhancement compared to the original DeepSolo**. These improvement allows DeepSolo with rescoring mechanism to provide a better tracking candidate pool for subsequent tracking. Furthermore, when we **replaced the LST-Matcher with ByteTrack, the MOTA significantly decreased by 6.99% (72.04% $\rightarrow$ 65.05%)**, highlighting the superior tracking capability of our proposed LST-Matcher. Together, the impressive results achieved by GoMatching are not merely attributed to the DeepSolo, but to the synergistic effect of our proposed methods.

Reviewer 1HqK4/10 · confidence 2/52024-07-12

Summary

The paper describes an approach for text spotting in videos. The method uses a text spotting method for still images to detect text instances frame by frame and the output is further processed by a specific module to find association between text instances through adjacent frames. In addition, a new dataset for video text spotting with curved text intances is presented. Experimental results are given for this new dataset and for several standard benchmarks for video text spotting.

Strengths

- The paper proposes a simple approach to get the associations between text instances in different frames obtained with a standard text spotting method in single images. Although I am not very familiar with archtectures for video text spotting, the cntribution seems interesting and it seems to have the potential to be used with different image text spotting methods. - Experimental results show that the proposed method performs well and also that the different components of the approach contribute positively to the global performance of the method.

Weaknesses

The paper is based on two main claims: one about the gap between detection and recognition and potential problems with optimization of association and the other, the lack of curved text in training data. I do not see through the paper how the proposed method and dataset help to solve these problems. Experimental results are good, but they are not put in relation with the initial claim and it is not shown how the proposed method help to alleviate this specific problem. On the other hand, a new dataset with curved text is proposed, but this dataset is not used to enrich the training data in the general setting and thus, it is not shown how it alleviated the lack of training data.

Questions

- The base DeepSolo method is kept frozen during training. What is the reason for that? Have you tried training also this part and see waht results are obtained? Some analysis and discussion about this would be interesting

Rating

4

Confidence

2

Soundness

2

Presentation

3

Contribution

2

Limitations

There is no specific discussion on the limitations of the method

Reviewer Lmjj2024-08-09

I appreciate the efforts paid by the authors to address my concerns, especially providing new experimental results as required. However, In response A1, as to the detection performance in the provided table, DeepSolo presents the highest precision, and low recall. It looks like the performance was not well tuned towards better F1-score? This result left my major concern unresolved. So I will keep my original rating.

Reviewer xYhx2024-08-10

I appreciate the author's efforts in addressing my concerns, particularly in providing the new experimental results as requested. The explanation of the domain gap isn't satisfactory. As they are processing a single frame at a time not a bunch of frames. So there is no time factor. Both the inputs are in the pixel domain. Maybe some text are little blurry or occluded. There are lots of recent works has have tackled these issues. So I would like to keep my rating same as the previous one.

Reviewer BgWx2024-08-11

Thank you for the author's response, which addressed my concern. I will keep my score as it is.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

To Reviewer 1HqK

Dear Reviewer 1HqK, Thanks again for your diligent effort in reviewing our submission! We have carefully addressed the concerns raised and conducted the requested experiments. As the discussion phase deadline is approaching, we sincerely hope you can consider positively recommending our work if your concerns are solved. If you still have further comments/suggestions, please don't hesitate to let us know. Best regards, Authors of Paper 2848

Reviewer 1HqK2024-08-13

I appreciate the responses given by the authors to my comments. I do not have any further comments, but i am not convinced yet about the relation between the proposed work and the motivation claimed in the introduction.

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Accept (poster)

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