TICLS: Tightly Coupled Language Text Spotter

Scene text spotting aims to detect and recognize text in real-world images, where instances are often short, fragmented, or visually ambiguous. Existing methods primarily rely on visual cues and implicitly capture local character dependencies, but they overlook the benefits of external linguistic knowledge. Prior attempts to integrate language models either adapt language modeling objectives without external knowledge or apply pretrained models that are misaligned with the word-level granularity of scene text. We propose TICLS, an end-to-end text spotter that explicitly incorporates external linguistic knowledge from a character-level pretrained language model. TICLS contains a pretrained linguistic decoder that fuses visual and linguistic features, enabling robust recognition of ambiguous or fragmented text. Experiments on ICDAR 2015, Total-Text, and CTW1500 demonstrate that TICLS achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating the effectiveness of PLM-guided linguistic integration for scene text spotting. The code is available at https://github.com/knowledge-computing/TiCLS.