# Learning Generative Structure Prior for Blind Text Image Super-resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.14726 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14726/

## Key facts

- Cited by 24 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00951/) (2020)
- [Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02766/) (2021)
- [Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14006/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Toward Real-World Single Image Super-Resolution: A New Benchmark and A New Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00523/) (2019)
- [Recovering Realistic Texture in Image Super-resolution by Deep Spatial Feature Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02815/) (2018)
- [PULSE: Self-Supervised Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration of Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03808/) (2020)
- [Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Facial Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04061/) (2021)
- ["Zero-Shot" Super-Resolution using Deep Internal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06087/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [SparseNeRF: Distilling Depth Ranking for Few-shot Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16196/) (2023)
- [GLARE: Low Light Image Enhancement via Generative Latent Feature based Codebook Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12431/) (2024)
- [Diffusion-based Blind Text Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08886/) (2023)
- [Visual Text Processing: A Comprehensive Review and Unified Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21682/) (2025)
- [Visual Text Meets Low-level Vision: A Comprehensive Survey on Visual Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03082/) (2024)
- [Augmenting Perceptual Super-Resolution via Image Quality Predictors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18524/) (2025)
- [Text-Aware Real-World Image Super-Resolution via Diffusion Model with Joint Segmentation Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04641/) (2025)
- [When StyleGAN Meets Stable Diffusion: a mathscrW_+ Adapter for Personalized Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17461/) (2023)
- [VQ-Font: Few-Shot Font Generation with Structure-Aware Enhancement and Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14018/) (2023)
- [Perception- and Fidelity-aware Reduced-Reference Super-Resolution Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09472/) (2024)
- [Boosting Diffusion-Based Text Image Super-Resolution Model Towards Generalized Real-World Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07232/) (2025)
- [MetaF2N: Blind Image Super-Resolution by Learning Efficient Model Adaptation from Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08113/) (2023)
- [Bilateral Event Mining and Complementary for Event Stream Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10037/) (2024)
- [Enhanced Generative Structure Prior for Chinese Text Image Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07537/) (2025)
- [Restore Text First, Enhance Image Later: Two-Stage Scene Text Image Super-Resolution with Glyph Structure Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21590/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Multi-modal Fusion of Spatially Variant Kernel Refinement with Diffusion Model for Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05808/) (2024)
- [Super-Resolving Blurry Images with Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06918/) (2024)
- [Combining Generative and Geometry Priors for Wide-Angle Portrait Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09911/) (2024)
- [TextSR: Diffusion Super-Resolution with Multilingual OCR Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23119/) (2025)
- [CONSTANT: Towards High-Quality One-Shot Handwriting Generation with Patch Contrastive Enhancement and Style-Aware Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07543/) (2026)
- [DualTSR: Unified Dual-Diffusion Transformer for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14207/) (2026)
- [Addressing Image Authenticity When Cameras Use Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21879/) (2026)
- [PRISM: Prior Rectification and Uncertainty-Aware Structure Modeling for Diffusion-Based Text Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13027/) (2026)
- [TOLA: Text-aware One-Step Latent Adaptation for Diffusion-based Text Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29240/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Blind text image super-resolution (SR) is challenging as one needs to cope with diverse font styles and unknown degradation. To address the problem, existing methods perform character recognition in parallel to regularize the SR task, either through a loss constraint or intermediate feature condition. Nonetheless, the high-level prior could still fail when encountering severe degradation. The problem is further compounded given characters of complex structures, e.g., Chinese characters that combine multiple pictographic or ideographic symbols into a single character. In this work, we present a novel prior that focuses more on the character structure. In particular, we learn to encapsulate rich and diverse structures in a StyleGAN and exploit such generative structure priors for restoration. To restrict the generative space of StyleGAN so that it obeys the structure of characters yet remains flexible in handling different font styles, we store the discrete features for each character in a codebook. The code subsequently drives the StyleGAN to generate high-resolution structural details to aid text SR. Compared to priors based on character recognition, the proposed structure prior exerts stronger character-specific guidance to restore faithful and precise strokes of a designated character. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the compelling performance of the proposed generative structure prior in facilitating robust text SR.