TextProposals: a Text-specific Selective Search Algorithm for Word Spotting in the Wild.

•We present a text specific object proposals algorithm.•Our algorithm is able to reach impressive recall rates with a few thousand proposals in different standard datasets.•Our method generates word proposals without an explicit character segmentation.•The combination of our object proposals with existing whole-word recognizers shows competitive performance in end-to-end word spotting, and, in some benchmarks, outperforms previously published results.