Text Prior Guided Scene Text Image Super-Resolution

Scene text image super-resolution (STISR) aims to improve the resolution and visual quality of low-resolution (LR) scene text images, while simultaneously boost the performance of text recognition. However, most of the existing STISR methods regard text images as natural scene images, ignoring the categorical information of text. In this paper, we make an inspiring attempt to embed text recognition prior into STISR model. Specifically, we adopt the predicted character recognition probability sequence as the text prior, which can be obtained conveniently from a text recognition model. The text prior provides categorical guidance to recover high-resolution (HR) text images. On the other hand, the reconstructed HR image can refine the text prior in return. Finally, we present a multi-stage text prior guided super-resolution (TPGSR) framework for STISR. Our experiments on the benchmark TextZoom dataset show that TPGSR can not only effectively improve the visual quality of scene text images, but also significantly improve the text recognition accuracy over existing STISR methods. Our model trained on TextZoom also demonstrates certain generalization capability to the LR images in other datasets.