Computer aided design (CAD) technology is widely used for architectural design, but current CAD tools still require high-level design specifications from human. It would be significant to construct an intelligent CAD system allowing automatic architectural layout parsing (AutoALP), which generates candidate designs or predicts architectural attributes without much user intervention. To tackle these problems, many learning-based methods were proposed, and benchmark dataset become one of the essential elements for the data-driven AutoALP. This paper proposes a new dataset called SCUT-AutoALP for multi-paradigm applications. It contains two subsets: 1) Subset-I is for floor plan design containing 300 residential floor plan images with layout, boundary and attribute labels; 2) Subset-II is for urban plan design containing 302 campus plan images with layout, boundary and attribute labels. We analyzed the samples and labels statistically, and evaluated SCUT-AutoALP for different layout parsing tasks of floor plan/urban plan based on conditional generative adversarial networks (cGAN) models. The results verify the effectiveness and indicate the potential applications of SCUT-AutoALP. The dataset is available at https://github.com/designfuturelab702/SCUT-AutoALP-Database-Release.

Video text detection (VTD) aims to localize text instances in videos, which has wide applications for downstream tasks. To deal with the variances of different scenes and text instances, multiple models and feature fusion strategies were typically integrated in existing VTD methods. A VTD method consisting of sophisticated components can efficiently improve detection accuracy, but may suffer from a limitation for real-time applications. This paper aims to achieve real-time VTD with an adaptive lightweight end-to-end framework. Different from previous methods that represent text in a spatial domain, we model text instances in the Fourier domain. Specifically, we propose a scale-aware Fourier Contour Embedding method, which not only models arbitrary shaped text contours of videos as compact signatures, but also adaptively select proper scales for features in a backbone in the training stage. Then, we construct VTD-FCENet to achieve real-time VTD, which encodes temporal correlations of adjacent frames with scale-aware FCE in a lightweight and adaptive manner. Quantitative evaluations were conducted on ICDAR2013 Video, Minetto and YVT benchmark datasets, and the results show that our VTD-FCENet not only obtains the state-of-the-arts or competitive detection accuracy, but also allows real-time text detection on HD videos simultaneously.