This work focuses on open-domain 4D avatarization, with the purpose of creating a 4D avatar from a portrait image in an arbitrary style. We select parametric triplanes as the intermediate 4D representation, and propose a practical training paradigm that takes advantage of both generative adversarial networks (GANs) and diffusion models. Our design stems from the observation that 4D GANs excel at bridging images and triplanes without supervision yet usually face challenges in handling diverse data distributions. A robust 2D diffusion prior emerges as the solution, assisting the GAN in transferring its expertise across various domains. The synergy between these experts permits the construction of a multi-domain image-triplane dataset, which drives the development of a general 4D avatar creator. Extensive experiments suggest that our model, termed AvatarArtist, is capable of producing high-quality 4D avatars with strong robustness to various source image domains. The code, the data, and the models will be made publicly available to facilitate future studies.

Graphic design is crucial for conveying ideas and messages. Designers usually organize their work into objects, backgrounds, and vectorized text layers to simplify editing. However, this workflow demands considerable expertise. With the rise of GenAI methods, an endless supply of high-quality graphic designs in pixel format has become more accessible, though these designs often lack editability. Despite this, non-layered designs still inspire human designers, influencing their choices in layouts and text styles, ultimately guiding the creation of layered designs. Motivated by this observation, we propose Accordion, a graphic design generation framework taking the first attempt to convert AI-generated designs into editable layered designs, meanwhile refining nonsensical AI-generated text with meaningful alternatives guided by user prompts. It is built around a vision language model (VLM) playing distinct roles in three curated stages. For each stage, we design prompts to guide the VLM in executing different tasks. Distinct from existing bottom-up methods (e.g., COLE and Open-COLE) that gradually generate elements to create layered designs, our approach works in a top-down manner by using the visually harmonious reference image as global guidance to decompose each layer. Additionally, it leverages multiple vision experts such as SAM and element removal models to facilitate the creation of graphic layers. We train our method using the in-house graphic design dataset Design39K, augmented with AI-generated design images coupled with refined ground truth created by a customized inpainting model. Experimental results and user studies by designers show that Accordion generates favorable results on the DesignIntention benchmark, including tasks such as text-to-template, adding text to background, and text de-rendering, and also excels in creating design variations.

We present TALE, a novel training-free framework harnessing the generative capabilities of text-to-image diffusion models to address the cross-domain image composition task that focuses on flawlessly incorporating user-specified objects into a designated visual

Text recognition is a long-standing research problem for document digitalization. Existing approaches are usually built based on CNN for image understanding and RNN for char-level text generation. In addition, another language model is usually needed to improve the overall accuracy as a post-processing step. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end text recognition approach with pre-trained image Transformer and text Transformer models, namely TrOCR, which leverages the Transformer architecture for both image understanding and wordpiece-level text generation. The TrOCR model is simple but effective, and can be pre-trained with large-scale synthetic data and fine-tuned with human-labeled datasets. Experiments show that the TrOCR model outperforms the current state-of-the-art models on the printed, handwritten and scene text recognition tasks. The TrOCR models and code are publicly available at https://aka.ms/trocr.

Diffusion models have gained increasing attention for their impressive generation abilities but currently struggle with rendering accurate and coherent text. To address this issue, we introduce TextDiffuser, focusing on generating images with visually appealing text that is coherent with backgrounds. TextDiffuser consists of two stages: first, a Transformer model generates the layout of keywords extracted from text prompts, and then diffusion models generate images conditioned on the text prompt and the generated layout. Additionally, we contribute the first large-scale text images dataset with OCR annotations, MARIO-10M, containing 10 million image-text pairs with text recognition, detection, and character-level segmentation annotations. We further collect the MARIO-Eval benchmark to serve as a comprehensive tool for evaluating text rendering quality. Through experiments and user studies, we demonstrate that TextDiffuser is flexible and controllable to create high-quality text images using text prompts alone or together with text template images, and conduct text inpainting to reconstruct incomplete images with text. We will make the code, model and dataset publicly available.

In the last decade, the blossom of deep learning has witnessed the rapid development of scene text recognition. However, the recognition of low-resolution scene text images remains a challenge. Even though some super-resolution methods have been proposed to tackle this problem, they usually treat text images as general images while ignoring the fact that the visual quality of strokes (the atomic unit of text) plays an essential role for text recognition. According to Gestalt Psychology, humans are capable of composing parts of details into the most similar objects guided by prior knowledge. Likewise, when humans observe a low-resolution text image, they will inherently use partial stroke-level details to recover the appearance of holistic characters. Inspired by Gestalt Psychology, we put forward a Stroke-Aware Scene Text Image Super-Resolution method containing a Stroke-Focused Module (SFM) to concentrate on stroke-level internal structures of characters in text images. Specifically, we attempt to design rules for decomposing English characters and digits at stroke-level, then pre-train a text recognizer to provide stroke-level attention maps as positional clues with the purpose of controlling the consistency between the generated super-resolution image and high-resolution ground truth. The extensive experimental results validate that the proposed method can indeed generate more distinguishable images on TextZoom and manually constructed Chinese character dataset Degraded-IC13. Furthermore, since the proposed SFM is only used to provide stroke-level guidance when training, it will not bring any time overhead during the test phase. Code is available at https://github.com/FudanVI/FudanOCR/tree/main/text-gestalt.

Image super-resolution, which is often regarded as a preprocessing procedure of scene text recognition, aims to recover the realistic features from a low-resolution text image. It has always been challenging due to large variations in text shapes, fonts, backgrounds, etc. However, most existing methods employ generic super-resolution frameworks to handle scene text images while ignoring text-specific properties such as text-level layouts and character-level details. In this paper, we establish a text-focused super-resolution framework, called Scene Text Telescope (STT). In terms of text-level layouts, we propose a Transformer-Based Super-Resolution Network (TBSRN) containing a Self-Attention Module to extract sequential information, which is robust to tackle the texts in arbitrary orientations. In terms of character-level details, we propose a Position-Aware Module and a Content-Aware Module to highlight the position and the content of each character. By observing that some characters look indistinguishable in low-resolution conditions, we use a weighted cross-entropy loss to tackle this problem. We conduct extensive experiments, including text recognition with pre-trained recognizers and image quality evaluation, on TextZoom and several scene text recognition benchmarks to assess the super-resolution images. The experimental results show that our STT can indeed generate text-focused super-resolution images and outperform the existing methods in terms of recognition accuracy.

Chinese character recognition has attracted much research interest due to its wide applications. Although it has been studied for many years, some issues in this field have not been completely resolved yet, \textit{e.g.} the zero-shot problem. Previous character-based and radical-based methods have not fundamentally addressed the zero-shot problem since some characters or radicals in test sets may not appear in training sets under a data-hungry condition. Inspired by the fact that humans can generalize to know how to write characters unseen before if they have learned stroke orders of some characters, we propose a stroke-based method by decomposing each character into a sequence of strokes, which are the most basic units of Chinese characters. However, we observe that there is a one-to-many relationship between stroke sequences and Chinese characters. To tackle this challenge, we employ a matching-based strategy to transform the predicted stroke sequence to a specific character. We evaluate the proposed method on handwritten characters, printed artistic characters, and scene characters. The experimental results validate that the proposed method outperforms existing methods on both character zero-shot and radical zero-shot tasks. Moreover, the proposed method can be easily generalized to other languages whose characters can be decomposed into strokes.