# OTR: Synthesizing Overlay Text Dataset for Text Removal

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02787 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02787/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [PaliGemma: A versatile 3B VLM for transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07726/) (2024)
- [The Open Images Dataset V4: Unified image classification, object detection, and visual relationship detection at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00982/) (2018)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)
- [SmolVLM: Redefining small and efficient multimodal models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05299/) (2025)
- [Real-Time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization and Adaptive Scale Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10304/) (2022)
- [Editing Text in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03047/) (2019)
- [MTRNet: A Generic Scene Text Eraser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04092/) (2019)
- [EnsNet: Ensconce Text in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00723/) (2018)
- [Scene Text Eraser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02772/) (2017)
- [MTRNet++: One-stage Mask-based Scene Text Eraser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07183/) (2019)
- [Stroke-Based Scene Text Erasing Using Synthetic Data for Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11493/) (2021)
- [Don't Forget Me: Accurate Background Recovery for Text Removal via Modeling Local-Global Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10273/) (2022)
- [PERT: A Progressively Region-based Network for Scene Text Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13029/) (2021)
- [The Surprisingly Straightforward Scene Text Removal Method With Gated Attention and Region of Interest Generation: A Comprehensive Prominent Model Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07489/) (2022)
- [FETNet: Feature Erasing and Transferring Network for Scene Text Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09593/) (2023)
- [ViTEraser: Harnessing the Power of Vision Transformers for Scene Text Removal with SegMIM Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12106/) (2023)
- [Progressive Scene Text Erasing with Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11469/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text removal is a crucial task in computer vision with applications such as privacy preservation, image editing, and media reuse. While existing research has primarily focused on scene text removal in natural images, limitations in current datasets hinder out-of-domain generalization or accurate evaluation. In particular, widely used benchmarks such as SCUT-EnsText suffer from ground truth artifacts due to manual editing, overly simplistic text backgrounds, and evaluation metrics that do not capture the quality of generated results. To address these issues, we introduce an approach to synthesizing a text removal benchmark applicable to domains other than scene texts. Our dataset features text rendered on complex backgrounds using object-aware placement and vision-language model-generated content, ensuring clean ground truth and challenging text removal scenarios. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/cyberagent/OTR .