Abstract:Current generative super-resolution methods show strong performance on natural images but distort text, creating a fundamental trade-off between image quality and textual readability. To address this, we introduce \textbf{TIGER} (\textbf{T}ext-\textbf{I}mage \textbf{G}uided sup\textbf{E}r-\textbf{R}esolution), a novel two-stage framework that breaks this trade-off through a \textit{"text-first, image-later"} paradigm. \textbf{TIGER} explicitly decouples glyph restoration from image enhancement: it first reconstructs precise text structures and then uses them to guide subsequent full-image super-resolution. This glyph-to-image guidance ensures both high fidelity and visual consistency. To support comprehensive training and evaluation, we also contribute the \textbf{UltraZoom-ST} (UltraZoom-Scene Text), the first scene text dataset with extreme zoom (\textbf{$\times$14.29}). Extensive experiments show that \textbf{TIGER} achieves \textbf{state-of-the-art} performance, enhancing readability while preserving overall image quality.
Abstract:The introduction of generative models has significantly advanced image super-resolution (SR) in handling real-world degradations. However, they often incur fidelity-related issues, particularly distorting textual structures. In this paper, we introduce a novel diffusion-based SR framework, namely TADiSR, which integrates text-aware attention and joint segmentation decoders to recover not only natural details but also the structural fidelity of text regions in degraded real-world images. Moreover, we propose a complete pipeline for synthesizing high-quality images with fine-grained full-image text masks, combining realistic foreground text regions with detailed background content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach substantially enhances text legibility in super-resolved images, achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple evaluation metrics and exhibiting strong generalization to real-world scenarios. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/mingcv/TADiSR}{here}.