# TextSR: Diffusion Super-Resolution with Multilingual OCR Guidance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23119 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23119/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 54 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Accurate Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04587/) (2015)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14100/) (2022)
- [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)
- [ByT5: Towards a token-free future with pre-trained byte-to-byte models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13626/) (2021)
- [Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07015/) (2023)
- [SRDiff: Single Image Super-Resolution with Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14951/) (2021)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Unified Diffusion Transformer for High-fidelity Text-Aware Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08922/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While recent advancements in Image Super-Resolution (SR) using diffusion models have shown promise in improving overall image quality, their application to scene text images has revealed limitations. These models often struggle with accurate text region localization and fail to effectively model image and multilingual character-to-shape priors. This leads to inconsistencies, the generation of hallucinated textures, and a decrease in the perceived quality of the super-resolved text. To address these issues, we introduce TextSR, a multimodal diffusion model specifically designed for Multilingual Scene Text Image Super-Resolution. TextSR leverages a text detector to pinpoint text regions within an image and then employs Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract multilingual text from these areas. The extracted text characters are then transformed into visual shapes using a UTF-8 based text encoder and cross-attention. Recognizing that OCR may sometimes produce inaccurate results in real-world scenarios, we have developed two innovative methods to enhance the robustness of our model. By integrating text character priors with the low-resolution text images, our model effectively guides the super-resolution process, enhancing fine details within the text and improving overall legibility. The superior performance of our model on both the TextZoom and TextVQA datasets sets a new benchmark for STISR, underscoring the efficacy of our approach.