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 .

Data augmentation policies drastically improve the performance of image recognition tasks, especially when the policies are optimized for the target data and tasks. In this paper, we propose to optimize image recognition models and data augmentation policies simultaneously to improve the performance using gradient descent. Unlike prior methods, our approach avoids using proxy tasks or reducing search space, and can directly improve the validation performance. Our method achieves efficient and scalable training by approximating the gradient of policies by implicit gradient with Neumann series approximation. We demonstrate that our approach can improve the performance of various image classification tasks, including fine-grained image recognition, without using dataset-specific hyperparameter tuning.

Collecting labeled data for training of models for image recognition problems, including handwritten text recognition (HTR), is a tedious and expensive task. Recent work on handwritten text generation shows that generative models can be used as a data augmentation method to improve the performance of HTR systems.

Scene text erasing is a task of removing text from natural scene images, which has been gaining attention in recent years. The main motivation is to conceal private information such as license plate numbers, and house nameplates that can appear in images. In this work, we propose a method for scene text erasing that approaches the problem as a general inpainting task. In contrast to previous methods, which require pairs of original images containing text and images from which the text has been removed, our method does not need corresponding image pairs for training. We use a separately trained scene text detector and an inpainting network. The scene text detector predicts segmentation maps of text instances which are then used as masks for the inpainting network. The network for inpainting, trained on a large-scale image dataset, fills in masked out regions in an input image and generates a final image in which the original text is no longer present. The results show that our method is able to successfully remove text and fill in the created holes to produce natural-looking images.

The increasing interest in scene text reading in multilingual environments raises the need to recognize and distinguish between different writing systems. In this paper, we propose a novel method for script identification in scene text using triplets of local convolutional features in combination with the traditional bag-of-visual-words model. Feature triplets are created by making combinations of descriptors extracted from local patches of the input images using a convolutional neural network. This approach allows us to generate a more descriptive codeword dictionary for the bag-of-visual-words model, as the low discriminative power of weak descriptors is enhanced by other descriptors in a triplet. The proposed method is evaluated on two public benchmark datasets for scene text script identification and a public dataset for script identification in video captions. The experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the baseline and yields competitive results on all three datasets.