# Enhancing Scene Text Detectors with Realistic Text Image Synthesis Using Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.16555 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16555/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 41 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Nov 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)
- [EAST: An Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03155/) (2017)
- [COCO-Text: Dataset and Benchmark for Text Detection and Recognition in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.07140/) (2016)
- [Real-time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08947/) (2019)
- [Read Like Humans: Autonomous, Bidirectional and Iterative Language Modeling for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06495/) (2021)
- [TextOCR: Towards large-scale end-to-end reasoning for arbitrary-shaped scene text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05486/) (2021)
- [Shape Robust Text Detection with Progressive Scale Expansion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12473/) (2019)
- [ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Arbitrary-Shaped Text (RRC-ArT)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07145/) (2019)
- [ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Multi-lingual Scene Text Detection and Recognition -- RRC-MLT-2019](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00945/) (2019)
- [Reading Text in the Wild with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1842/) (2014)
- [ICDAR 2019 Competition on Large-scale Street View Text with Partial Labeling -- RRC-LSVT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07741/) (2019)
- [TextBoxes: A Fast Text Detector with a Single Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06779/) (2016)
- [Scene Text Detection and Recognition: The Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04256/) (2018)
- [Character-Aware Models Improve Visual Text Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10562/) (2022)
- [ABCNet v2: Adaptive Bezier-Curve Network for Real-time End-to-end Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03620/) (2021)
- [Editing Text in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03047/) (2019)
- [Fourier Contour Embedding for Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10442/) (2021)
- [Deep Relational Reasoning Graph Network for Arbitrary Shape Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07493/) (2020)
- [DG-Font: Deformable Generative Networks for Unsupervised Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03064/) (2021)
- [ScrabbleGAN: Semi-Supervised Varying Length Handwritten Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10557/) (2020)
- [GANwriting: Content-Conditioned Generation of Styled Handwritten Word Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02567/) (2020)
- [DPText-DETR: Towards Better Scene Text Detection with Dynamic Points in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04491/) (2022)
- [Improving Diffusion Models for Scene Text Editing with Dual Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05568/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scene text detection techniques have garnered significant attention due to their wide-ranging applications. However, existing methods have a high demand for training data, and obtaining accurate human annotations is labor-intensive and time-consuming. As a solution, researchers have widely adopted synthetic text images as a complementary resource to real text images during pre-training. Yet there is still room for synthetic datasets to enhance the performance of scene text detectors. We contend that one main limitation of existing generation methods is the insufficient integration of foreground text with the background. To alleviate this problem, we present the Diffusion Model based Text Generator (DiffText), a pipeline that utilizes the diffusion model to seamlessly blend foreground text regions with the background's intrinsic features. Additionally, we propose two strategies to generate visually coherent text with fewer spelling errors. With fewer text instances, our produced text images consistently surpass other synthetic data in aiding text detectors. Extensive experiments on detecting horizontal, rotated, curved, and line-level texts demonstrate the effectiveness of DiffText in producing realistic text images.