# Self-supervised Character-to-Character Distillation for Text Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.00288 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00288/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [An End-to-End Trainable Neural Network for Image-based Sequence Recognition and Its Application to Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.05717/) (2015)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)
- [Single Image Super-Resolution via a Holistic Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08767/) (2020)
- [Synthetic Data and Artificial Neural Networks for Natural Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2227/) (2014)
- [Read Like Humans: Autonomous, Bidirectional and Iterative Language Modeling for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06495/) (2021)
- [What Is Wrong With Scene Text Recognition Model Comparisons? Dataset and Model Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01906/) (2019)
- [Mask TextSpotter: An End-to-End Trainable Neural Network for Spotting Text with Arbitrary Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08207/) (2019)
- [TextOCR: Towards large-scale end-to-end reasoning for arbitrary-shaped scene text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05486/) (2021)
- [Scene Text Recognition with Permuted Autoregressive Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06966/) (2022)
- [Towards Accurate Scene Text Recognition with Semantic Reasoning Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12294/) (2020)
- [Show, Attend and Read: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Irregular Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00751/) (2018)
- [SEED: Semantics Enhanced Encoder-Decoder Framework for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10977/) (2020)
- [Decoupled Attention Network for Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10205/) (2019)
- [From Two to One: A New Scene Text Recognizer with Visual Language Modeling Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09661/) (2021)
- [TAP: Text-Aware Pre-training for Text-VQA and Text-Caption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04638/) (2020)
- [RobustScanner: Dynamically Enhancing Positional Clues for Robust Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07542/) (2020)
- [A critical analysis of self-supervision, or what we can learn from a single image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.13132/) (2019)
- [Sequence-to-Sequence Contrastive Learning for Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10873/) (2020)
- [SCATTER: Selective Context Attentional Scene Text Recognizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11288/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [CLIP4STR: A Simple Baseline for Scene Text Recognition with Pre-trained Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14014/) (2023)
- [SVTRv2: CTC Beats Encoder-Decoder Models in Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15858/) (2024)
- [Marten: Visual Question Answering with Mask Generation for Multi-modal Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14140/) (2025)
- [PosFormer: Recognizing Complex Handwritten Mathematical Expression with Position Forest Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07764/) (2024)
- [Instruction-Guided Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17851/) (2024)
- [A Token-level Text Image Foundation Model for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02304/) (2025)
- [UniRec-0.1B: Unified Text and Formula Recognition with 0.1B Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21095/) (2025)
- [Bridging Synthetic and Real Worlds for Pre-training Scene Text Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05286/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Large Language Models for Text-rich Image Understanding: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16586/) (2025)
- [Self-distillation Regularized Connectionist Temporal Classification Loss for Text Recognition: A Simple Yet Effective Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08806/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Pre-training with Symmetric Superimposition Modeling for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05841/) (2024)
- [Linguistics-aware Masked Image Modeling for Self-supervised Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18746/) (2025)
- [VL-Reader: Vision and Language Reconstructor is an Effective Scene Text Recognizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11656/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised Learning for Text Recognition: A Critical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19889/) (2024)
- [Decoder Pre-Training with only Text for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05706/) (2024)
- [ESTR-CoT: Towards Explainable and Accurate Event Stream based Scene Text Recognition with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02200/) (2025)
- [CodePercept: Code-Grounded Visual STEM Perception for MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10757/) (2026)
- [What Is Wrong with Synthetic Data for Scene Text Recognition? A Strong Synthetic Engine with Diverse Simulations and Self-Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06450/) (2026)
- [Advancing WordArt-Oriented Scene Text Recognition: Datasets and Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24484/) (2026)
- [LightSTAR: Efficient Visual Document Retrieval via Lightweight Selection with Vision-Adaptive Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23539/) (2026)
- [All-in-One Multilingual Scene Text Recognition with Script-aware Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24058/) (2026)
- [HIP: Hierarchical Point Modeling and Pre-training for Visual Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01139/) (2024)
- [Relational Contrastive Learning and Masked Image Modeling for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11219/) (2024)
- [Contrastive Masked Autoencoders for Character-Level Open-Set Writer Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11895/) (2025)
- [Joint Low-level and High-level Textual Representation Learning with Multiple Masking Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06855/) (2025)
- [RGB-Event HyperGraph Prompt for Kilometer Marker Recognition based on Pre-trained Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22026/) (2026)
- [Masked Next-Scale Prediction for Self-supervised Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14885/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

When handling complicated text images (e.g., irregular structures, low resolution, heavy occlusion, and uneven illumination), existing supervised text recognition methods are data-hungry. Although these methods employ large-scale synthetic text images to reduce the dependence on annotated real images, the domain gap still limits the recognition performance. Therefore, exploring the robust text feature representations on unlabeled real images by self-supervised learning is a good solution. However, existing self-supervised text recognition methods conduct sequence-to-sequence representation learning by roughly splitting the visual features along the horizontal axis, which limits the flexibility of the augmentations, as large geometric-based augmentations may lead to sequence-to-sequence feature inconsistency. Motivated by this, we propose a novel self-supervised Character-to-Character Distillation method, CCD, which enables versatile augmentations to facilitate general text representation learning. Specifically, we delineate the character structures of unlabeled real images by designing a self-supervised character segmentation module. Following this, CCD easily enriches the diversity of local characters while keeping their pairwise alignment under flexible augmentations, using the transformation matrix between two augmented views from images. Experiments demonstrate that CCD achieves state-of-the-art results, with average performance gains of 1.38% in text recognition, 1.7% in text segmentation, 0.24 dB (PSNR) and 0.0321 (SSIM) in text super-resolution. Code is available at https://github.com/TongkunGuan/CCD.