# MTRNet: A Generic Scene Text Eraser

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.04092 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04092/

## Key facts

- Cited by 29 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [De-rendering Stylized Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01890/) (2021)
- [Stroke-Based Scene Text Erasing Using Synthetic Data for Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11493/) (2021)
- [Visual Text Processing: A Comprehensive Review and Unified Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21682/) (2025)
- [Don't Forget Me: Accurate Background Recovery for Text Removal via Modeling Local-Global Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10273/) (2022)
- [PERT: A Progressively Region-based Network for Scene Text Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13029/) (2021)
- [STRIVE: Scene Text Replacement In Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02762/) (2021)
- [The Surprisingly Straightforward Scene Text Removal Method With Gated Attention and Region of Interest Generation: A Comprehensive Prominent Model Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07489/) (2022)
- [FETNet: Feature Erasing and Transferring Network for Scene Text Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09593/) (2023)
- [ViTEraser: Harnessing the Power of Vision Transformers for Scene Text Removal with SegMIM Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12106/) (2023)
- [UPOCR: Towards Unified Pixel-Level OCR Interface](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02694/) (2023)
- [RewriteNet: Reliable Scene Text Editing with Implicit Decomposition of Text Contents and Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11041/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Text Erasing with Controllable Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12743/) (2022)
- [Progressive Scene Text Erasing with Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11469/) (2022)
- [PSSTRNet: Progressive Segmentation-guided Scene Text Removal Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07842/) (2023)
- [Visual Text Meets Low-level Vision: A Comprehensive Survey on Visual Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03082/) (2024)
- [A Scene-Text Synthesis Engine Achieved Through Learning from Decomposed Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02397/) (2022)
- [Scene Style Text Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10097/) (2023)
- [DeepEraser: Deep Iterative Context Mining for Generic Text Eraser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19108/) (2024)
- [DiffSTR: Controlled Diffusion Models for Scene Text Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21721/) (2024)
- [Who Can See Through You? Adversarial Shielding Against VLM-Based Attribute Inference Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18264/) (2025)
- [TPFNet: A Novel Text In-painting Transformer for Text Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14461/) (2022)
- [Selective Scene Text Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00410/) (2023)
- [CLEAR: Context-Aware Learning with End-to-End Mask-Free Inference for Adaptive Video Subtitle Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21901/) (2026)
- [Leveraging Text Localization for Scene Text Removal via Text-aware Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13431/) (2024)
- [MSLKANet: A Multi-Scale Large Kernel Attention Network for Scene Text Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06565/) (2022)
- [TextDestroyer: A Training- and Annotation-Free Diffusion Method for Destroying Anomal Text from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00355/) (2024)
- [Inverse Scene Text Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21002/) (2025)
- [OTR: Synthesizing Overlay Text Dataset for Text Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02787/) (2025)
- [What Shape Is Optimal for Masks in Text Removal?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22499/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text removal algorithms have been proposed for uni-lingual scripts with regular shapes and layouts. However, to the best of our knowledge, a generic text removal method which is able to remove all or user-specified text regions regardless of font, script, language or shape is not available. Developing such a generic text eraser for real scenes is a challenging task, since it inherits all the challenges of multi-lingual and curved text detection and inpainting. To fill this gap, we propose a mask-based text removal network (MTRNet). MTRNet is a conditional adversarial generative network (cGAN) with an auxiliary mask. The introduced auxiliary mask not only makes the cGAN a generic text eraser, but also enables stable training and early convergence on a challenging large-scale synthetic dataset, initially proposed for text detection in real scenes. What's more, MTRNet achieves state-of-the-art results on several real-world datasets including ICDAR 2013, ICDAR 2017 MLT, and CTW1500, without being explicitly trained on this data, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods trained directly on these datasets.