Character-Level Visual Guidance for Arbitrarily Shaped Scene Text Detection and Recognition

Curved, blurred, low-contrast, and cluttered scene text remains difficult to localize and transcribe because visual boundaries and character identities are often ambiguous. Most detectors refine spatial regions from visual and positional features, while many recognizers depend on implicit attention between global image tokens and language context. This separation weakens character-level evidence in both localization and text decoding. To address this issue, this paper studies explicit character-level guidance for scene text detection and recognition. For arbitrary-shaped text detection, the character-guided adaptive detector (CADet) combines a text-enhancement network (TENet), a character information adaptive guidance module (CIA), and a position and classification compensation module (COMP). Then, character semantics can participate in boundary-query construction before final detection. For scene text recognition (STR), serialized image embeddings for text recognition (SIETR) introduce local visual embeddings into autoregressive decoding via the character local image embedding module (CLIE) and permutation language modeling (PLM). On ArT, Total-Text, and CTW1500, CADet obtains F-measures of 79.5%, 89.4%, and 89.2%, respectively, outperforming representative Transformer-based detectors with only a small increase in computation. For recognition, SIETR reaches 95.6% sample-size-weighted average accuracy with 23.8 M parameters and 3.2 G FLOPs and improves most irregular-text benchmarks over PARSeq with fewer FLOPs. The results indicate that character semantics for detection and local visual evidence for decoding are an effective way to improve robustness in difficult scene text.