# Recognition-Guided Diffusion Model for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.13317 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13317/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 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 19 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Nov 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Inverse problems and image restoration](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/inverse-problems-and-image-restoration/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [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)
- [SRDiff: Single Image Super-Resolution with Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14951/) (2021)
- [Read Like Humans: Autonomous, Bidirectional and Iterative Language Modeling for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06495/) (2021)
- [Scene Text Recognition with Permuted Autoregressive Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06966/) (2022)
- [Scene Text Image Super-Resolution in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03341/) (2020)
- [3DDesigner: Towards Photorealistic 3D Object Generation and Editing with Text-guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14108/) (2022)
- [A Text Attention Network for Spatial Deformation Robust Scene Text Image Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09388/) (2022)
- [A Multi-Object Rectified Attention Network for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03003/) (2019)
- [Text Gestalt: Stroke-Aware Scene Text Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08171/) (2021)
- [C3-STISR: Scene Text Image Super-resolution with Triple Clues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14044/) (2022)
- [Improving Scene Text Image Super-resolution via Dual Prior Modulation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10414/) (2023)
- [TextDiff: Mask-Guided Residual Diffusion Models for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06743/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Perception- and Fidelity-aware Reduced-Reference Super-Resolution Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09472/) (2024)
- [Enhanced Generative Structure Prior for Chinese Text Image Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07537/) (2025)
- [NCAP: Scene Text Image Super-Resolution with Non-CAtegorical Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00410/) (2025)
- [DualTSR: Unified Dual-Diffusion Transformer for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14207/) (2026)
- [CharDiff-LP: A Diffusion Model with Character-Level Guidance for License Plate Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17330/) (2025)
- [TOLA: Text-aware One-Step Latent Adaptation for Diffusion-based Text Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29240/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scene Text Image Super-Resolution (STISR) aims to enhance the resolution and legibility of text within low-resolution (LR) images, consequently elevating recognition accuracy in Scene Text Recognition (STR). Previous methods predominantly employ discriminative Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) augmented with diverse forms of text guidance to address this issue. Nevertheless, they remain deficient when confronted with severely blurred images, due to their insufficient generation capability when little structural or semantic information can be extracted from original images. Therefore, we introduce RGDiffSR, a Recognition-Guided Diffusion model for scene text image Super-Resolution, which exhibits great generative diversity and fidelity even in challenging scenarios. Moreover, we propose a Recognition-Guided Denoising Network, to guide the diffusion model generating LR-consistent results through succinct semantic guidance. Experiments on the TextZoom dataset demonstrate the superiority of RGDiffSR over prior state-of-the-art methods in both text recognition accuracy and image fidelity.