Scene Text Image Super-resolution based on Text-conditional Diffusion Models
On the map: Diffusion models → Inverse problems and image restoration
Abstract (arXiv)
Scene Text Image Super-resolution (STISR) has recently achieved great success as a preprocessing method for scene text recognition. STISR aims to transform blurred and noisy low-resolution (LR) text images in real-world settings into clear high-resolution (HR) text images suitable for scene text recognition. In this study, we leverage text-conditional diffusion models (DMs), known for their impressive text-to-image synthesis capabilities, for STISR tasks. Our experimental results revealed that text-conditional DMs notably surpass existing STISR methods. Especially when texts from LR text images are given as input, the text-conditional DMs are able to produce superior quality super-resolution text images. Utilizing this capability, we propose a novel framework for synthesizing LR-HR paired text image datasets. This framework consists of three specialized text-conditional DMs, each dedicated to text image synthesis, super-resolution, and image degradation. These three modules are vital for synthesizing distinct LR and HR paired images, which are more suitable for training STISR methods. Our experiments confirmed that these synthesized image pairs significantly enhance the performance of STISR methods in the TextZoom evaluation.
Key facts. Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Inverse problems and image restoration, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 47 of its 66 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Nov 2023.
Builds on
47 of 66 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 4; 2025: 8; 2026: 2.
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- 2025Visual Text Processing: A Comprehensive Review and Unified Evaluationcited by 19
- 2024FreeDiff: Progressive Frequency Truncation for Image Editing with Diffusion Modelscited by 13
- 2024Visual Text Meets Low-level Vision: A Comprehensive Survey on Visual Text Processingcited by 8
- 2025Dual-domain Modulation Network for Lightweight Image Super-Resolutioncited by 8
- 2023PEAN: A Diffusion-Based Prior-Enhanced Attention Network for Scene Text Image Super-Resolutioncited by 4
- 2024Perception- and Fidelity-aware Reduced-Reference Super-Resolution Image Quality Assessmentcited by 4
- 2025Enhanced Generative Structure Prior for Chinese Text Image Super-resolutioncited by 3
- 2025Unified Diffusion Transformer for High-fidelity Text-Aware Image Restorationcited by 3
- 2025NCAP: Scene Text Image Super-Resolution with Non-CAtegorical Priorcited by 1
- 2025TextSR: Diffusion Super-Resolution with Multilingual OCR Guidancecited by 1
- 2026DualTSR: Unified Dual-Diffusion Transformer for Scene Text Image Super-Resolutioncited by 1
- 2024Text Image Generation for Low-Resource Languages with Dual Translation Learningcited by 0
3 more
- 2025CharDiff-LP: A Diffusion Model with Character-Level Guidance for License Plate Image Restorationcited by 0
- 2025GLYPH-SR: Can We Achieve Both High-Quality Image Super-Resolution and High-Fidelity Text Recovery via VLM-guided Latent Diffusion Model?cited by 0
- 2026TOLA: Text-aware One-Step Latent Adaptation for Diffusion-based Text Image Super-Resolutioncited by 0
- 2026TOLA: Text-aware One-Step Latent Adaptation for Diffusion-based Text Image Super-Resolution24 Sep 2026
- 2026DualTSR: Unified Dual-Diffusion Transformer for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution15 Mar 2026
- 2025Unified Diffusion Transformer for High-fidelity Text-Aware Image Restoration9 Dec 2025
- 2025GLYPH-SR: Can We Achieve Both High-Quality Image Super-Resolution and High-Fidelity Text Recovery via VLM-guided Latent Diffusion Model?30 Oct 2025
- 2025CharDiff-LP: A Diffusion Model with Character-Level Guidance for License Plate Image Restoration20 Oct 2025
- 2025Enhanced Generative Structure Prior for Chinese Text Image Super-resolution11 Aug 2025
- 2025TextSR: Diffusion Super-Resolution with Multilingual OCR Guidance29 May 2025
- 2025Visual Text Processing: A Comprehensive Review and Unified Evaluation30 Apr 2025
- 2025NCAP: Scene Text Image Super-Resolution with Non-CAtegorical Prior1 Apr 2025
- 2025Dual-domain Modulation Network for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution13 Mar 2025
- 2024Text Image Generation for Low-Resource Languages with Dual Translation Learning26 Sep 2024
- 2024Perception- and Fidelity-aware Reduced-Reference Super-Resolution Image Quality Assessment15 May 2024
3 more
- 2024FreeDiff: Progressive Frequency Truncation for Image Editing with Diffusion Models18 Apr 2024
- 2024Visual Text Meets Low-level Vision: A Comprehensive Survey on Visual Text Processing5 Feb 2024
- 2023PEAN: A Diffusion-Based Prior-Enhanced Attention Network for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution29 Nov 2023
- 2024FreeDiff: Progressive Frequency Truncation for Image Editing with Diffusion Modelscited by 13
- 2025Unified Diffusion Transformer for High-fidelity Text-Aware Image Restorationcited by 3
- 2025TextSR: Diffusion Super-Resolution with Multilingual OCR Guidancecited by 1
- 2026DualTSR: Unified Dual-Diffusion Transformer for Scene Text Image Super-Resolutioncited by 1
- 2025CharDiff-LP: A Diffusion Model with Character-Level Guidance for License Plate Image Restorationcited by 0
- 2025GLYPH-SR: Can We Achieve Both High-Quality Image Super-Resolution and High-Fidelity Text Recovery via VLM-guided Latent Diffusion Model?cited by 0
- 2026TOLA: Text-aware One-Step Latent Adaptation for Diffusion-based Text Image Super-Resolutioncited by 0
- 2026TOLA: Text-aware One-Step Latent Adaptation for Diffusion-based Text Image Super-Resolution24 Sep 2026
- 2026DualTSR: Unified Dual-Diffusion Transformer for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution15 Mar 2026
- 2025Unified Diffusion Transformer for High-fidelity Text-Aware Image Restoration9 Dec 2025
- 2025GLYPH-SR: Can We Achieve Both High-Quality Image Super-Resolution and High-Fidelity Text Recovery via VLM-guided Latent Diffusion Model?30 Oct 2025
- 2025CharDiff-LP: A Diffusion Model with Character-Level Guidance for License Plate Image Restoration20 Oct 2025
- 2025TextSR: Diffusion Super-Resolution with Multilingual OCR Guidance29 May 2025
- 2024FreeDiff: Progressive Frequency Truncation for Image Editing with Diffusion Models18 Apr 2024
- 2025Visual Text Processing: A Comprehensive Review and Unified Evaluationcited by 19
- 2024Visual Text Meets Low-level Vision: A Comprehensive Survey on Visual Text Processingcited by 8
- 2025Dual-domain Modulation Network for Lightweight Image Super-Resolutioncited by 8
- 2023PEAN: A Diffusion-Based Prior-Enhanced Attention Network for Scene Text Image Super-Resolutioncited by 4
- 2024Perception- and Fidelity-aware Reduced-Reference Super-Resolution Image Quality Assessmentcited by 4
- 2025Enhanced Generative Structure Prior for Chinese Text Image Super-resolutioncited by 3
- 2025NCAP: Scene Text Image Super-Resolution with Non-CAtegorical Priorcited by 1
- 2024Text Image Generation for Low-Resource Languages with Dual Translation Learningcited by 0
- 2025Enhanced Generative Structure Prior for Chinese Text Image Super-resolution11 Aug 2025
- 2025Visual Text Processing: A Comprehensive Review and Unified Evaluation30 Apr 2025
- 2025NCAP: Scene Text Image Super-Resolution with Non-CAtegorical Prior1 Apr 2025
- 2025Dual-domain Modulation Network for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution13 Mar 2025
- 2024Text Image Generation for Low-Resource Languages with Dual Translation Learning26 Sep 2024
- 2024Perception- and Fidelity-aware Reduced-Reference Super-Resolution Image Quality Assessment15 May 2024
- 2024Visual Text Meets Low-level Vision: A Comprehensive Survey on Visual Text Processing5 Feb 2024
- 2023PEAN: A Diffusion-Based Prior-Enhanced Attention Network for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution29 Nov 2023
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- 2023Recognition-Guided Diffusion Model for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution
- 2023TextDiff: Mask-Guided Residual Diffusion Models for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution
- 2025Text-Aware Real-World Image Super-Resolution via Diffusion Model with Joint Segmentation Decoders
- 2026Coupled Continuous-Discrete Generation for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution
- 2024TextSSR: Diffusion-based Data Synthesis for Scene Text Recognition
- 2025Boosting Diffusion-Based Text Image Super-Resolution Model Towards Generalized Real-World Scenarios
- 2026TEXTS-Diff: TEXTS-Aware Diffusion Model for Real-World Text Image Super-Resolution
- 2023Diffusion-based Blind Text Image Super-Resolution