Realtime multi-scale scene text detection with scale-based region proposal network.

•We propose a novel network named SRPN to realize both text/non-text localization and scale estimation efficiently.•A two-stage detection scheme based on SRPN is proposed to avoid using multi-scale pyramid input and achieve faster detection speed.•The proposed method achieves remarkable speedup on ICDAR2015, ICDAR2013 and MSRA-TD500 while keeping competitive performance.•Ablation experiments are given to prove reasonableness of the proposed method from different aspects.