# SwapText: Image Based Texts Transfer in Scenes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.08152 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08152/

## Key facts

- Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [TextStyleBrush: Transfer of Text Aesthetics from a Single Example](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08385/) (2021)
- [Improving Diffusion Models for Scene Text Editing with Dual Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05568/) (2023)
- [DiffUTE: Universal Text Editing Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10825/) (2023)
- [TextCtrl: Diffusion-based Scene Text Editing with Prior Guidance Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10133/) (2024)
- [Brush Your Text: Synthesize Any Scene Text on Images via Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12232/) (2023)
- [Exploring Stroke-Level Modifications for Scene Text Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01982/) (2022)
- [Content and Style Aware Generation of Text-line Images for Handwriting Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05539/) (2022)
- [Look Closer to Supervise Better: One-Shot Font Generation via Component-Based Discriminator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00146/) (2022)
- [De-rendering Stylized Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01890/) (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)
- [TextPainter: Multimodal Text Image Generation with Visual-harmony and Text-comprehension for Poster Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04733/) (2023)
- [DreamText: High Fidelity Scene Text Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14701/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Structure-Texture Separation Network for Oracle Character Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06549/) (2022)
- [Layout Agnostic Scene Text Image Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01062/) (2024)
- [STRIVE: Scene Text Replacement In Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02762/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Towards Diverse and Consistent Typography Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02099/) (2023)
- [GlyphMastero: A Glyph Encoder for High-Fidelity Scene Text Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04915/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Kinetic Typography Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10476/) (2024)
- [How Control Information Influences Multilingual Text Image Generation and Editing?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11502/) (2024)
- [Intelligent Artistic Typography: A Comprehensive Review of Artistic Text Design and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14774/) (2024)
- [Visual Text Meets Low-level Vision: A Comprehensive Survey on Visual Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03082/) (2024)
- [TextSSR: Diffusion-based Data Synthesis for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01137/) (2024)
- [Type-R: Automatically Retouching Typos for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18159/) (2024)
- [GenText: Unsupervised Artistic Text Generation via Decoupled Font and Texture Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09649/) (2022)
- [FASTER: A Font-Agnostic Scene Text Editing and Rendering Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02905/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Swapping text in scene images while preserving original fonts, colors, sizes and background textures is a challenging task due to the complex interplay between different factors. In this work, we present SwapText, a three-stage framework to transfer texts across scene images. First, a novel text swapping network is proposed to replace text labels only in the foreground image. Second, a background completion network is learned to reconstruct background images. Finally, the generated foreground image and background image are used to generate the word image by the fusion network. Using the proposing framework, we can manipulate the texts of the input images even with severe geometric distortion. Qualitative and quantitative results are presented on several scene text datasets, including regular and irregular text datasets. We conducted extensive experiments to prove the usefulness of our method such as image based text translation, text image synthesis, etc.