PyrBoxes: An Efficient Multi-scale Scene Text Detector with Feature Pyramids

•An efficient and effective model is proposed for multi-scale scene text detection.•A grouped pyramid module is used to group basic layers for more accurate detection.•The pyramid module includes a top-down partition and a bottom-up group.•PyrBoxes achieves the state-of-the-art performance with a significantly faster speed.•The generality of PyrBoxes is verified by a newly constructed Chinese text dataset.