# TextSSR: Diffusion-based Data Synthesis for Scene Text Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.01137 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01137/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (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)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)
- [Synthetic Data from Diffusion Models Improves ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08466/) (2023)
- [Is synthetic data from generative models ready for image recognition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07574/) (2022)
- [COCO-Text: Dataset and Benchmark for Text Detection and Recognition in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.07140/) (2016)
- [TextDiffuser: Diffusion Models as Text Painters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10855/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Mixed-Type Tabular Data Synthesis with Score-based Diffusion in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09656/) (2023)
- [TextOCR: Towards large-scale end-to-end reasoning for arbitrary-shaped scene text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05486/) (2021)
- [AnyText: Multilingual Visual Text Generation And Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03054/) (2023)
- [Scene Text Recognition with Permuted Autoregressive Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06966/) (2022)
- [ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Arbitrary-Shaped Text (RRC-ArT)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07145/) (2019)
- [TextDiffuser-2: Unleashing the Power of Language Models for Text Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16465/) (2023)
- [ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Multi-lingual Scene Text Detection and Recognition -- RRC-MLT-2019](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00945/) (2019)
- [GlyphControl: Glyph Conditional Control for Visual Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18259/) (2023)
- [Show, Attend and Read: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Irregular Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00751/) (2018)
- [ICDAR 2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Reading Chinese Text on Signboard](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09641/) (2019)
- [DatasetDM: Synthesizing Data with Perception Annotations Using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06160/) (2023)
- [ICDAR 2019 Competition on Large-scale Street View Text with Partial Labeling -- RRC-LSVT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07741/) (2019)
- [Wukong: A 100 Million Large-scale Chinese Cross-modal Pre-training Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06767/) (2022)
- [Dataset Diffusion: Diffusion-based Synthetic Dataset Generation for Pixel-Level Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14303/) (2023)
- [PP-OCRv3: More Attempts for the Improvement of Ultra Lightweight OCR System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03001/) (2022)
- [ICDAR2017 Competition on Reading Chinese Text in the Wild (RCTW-17)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.09585/) (2017)
- [Leaving Reality to Imagination: Robust Classification via Generated Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02503/) (2023)
- [SVTR: Scene Text Recognition with a Single Visual Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00159/) (2022)
- [Editing Text in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03047/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [ICPR 2026 Competition on Low-Resolution License Plate Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22506/) (2026)
- [OmniText: A Training-Free Generalist for Controllable Text-Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24093/) (2025)
- [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)
- [All-in-One Multilingual Scene Text Recognition with Script-aware Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24058/) (2026)
- [UniTriGen: Unified Triplet Generation of Aligned Visible-Infrared-Label for Few-Shot RGB-T Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14626/) (2026)
- [TraRA: Trajectory-level Recognition Aggregation for Video Text Spotting in Urban Surveillance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07161/) (2026)
- [Decompose Radicals, Then Reward: Fine-Grained Inspection for Accurate Chinese Text Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37569/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scene text recognition (STR) suffers from challenges of either less realistic synthetic training data or the difficulty of collecting sufficient high-quality real-world data, limiting the effectiveness of trained models. Meanwhile, despite producing holistically appealing text images, diffusion-based visual text generation methods struggle to synthesize accurate and realistic instance-level text at scale. To tackle this, we introduce TextSSR: a novel pipeline for Synthesizing Scene Text Recognition training data. TextSSR targets three key synthesizing characteristics: accuracy, realism, and scalability. It achieves accuracy through a proposed region-centric text generation with position-glyph enhancement, ensuring proper character placement. It maintains realism by guiding style and appearance generation using contextual hints from surrounding text or background. This character-aware diffusion architecture enjoys precise character-level control and semantic coherence preservation, without relying on natural language prompts. Therefore, TextSSR supports large-scale generation through combinatorial text permutations. Based on these, we present TextSSR-F, a dataset of 3.55 million quality-screened text instances. Extensive experiments show that STR models trained on TextSSR-F outperform those trained on existing synthetic datasets by clear margins on common benchmarks, and further improvements are observed when mixed with real-world training data. Code is available at https://github.com/YesianRohn/TextSSR.