Text-Aware Image Restoration with Diffusion Models
Authors: name: Jaewon Min; name: Jin Hyeon Kim; name: Paul Hyunbin Cho; name: Jaeeun Lee; name: Jihye Park; name: Minkyu Park; name: Sangpil Kim; name: Hyunhee Park; name: Seungryong Kim
Published: 2025-06-11 17:59:46

Abstract: Image restoration aims to recover degraded images. However, existing
diffusion-based restoration methods, despite great success in natural image
restoration, often struggle to faithfully reconstruct textual regions in
degraded images. Those methods frequently generate plausible but incorrect
text-like patterns, a phenomenon we refer to as text-image hallucination. In
this paper, we introduce Text-Aware Image Restoration (TAIR), a novel
restoration task that requires the simultaneous recovery of visual contents and
textual fidelity. To tackle this task, we present SA-Text, a large-scale
benchmark of 100K high-quality scene images densely annotated with diverse and
complex text instances. Furthermore, we propose a multi-task diffusion
framework, called TeReDiff, that integrates internal features from diffusion
models into a text-spotting module, enabling both components to benefit from
joint training. This allows for the extraction of rich text representations,
which are utilized as prompts in subsequent denoising steps. Extensive
experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms
state-of-the-art restoration methods, achieving significant gains in text
recognition accuracy. See our project page: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/TAIR/