Restore Text First, Enhance Image Later: Two-Stage Scene Text Image Super-Resolution with Glyph Structure Guidance

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.

TinySR: Pruning Diffusion for Real-World Image Super-Resolution

Real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) focuses on recovering high-quality images from low-resolution inputs that suffer from complex degradations like noise, blur, and compression. Recently, diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential in this area by leveraging strong generative priors to restore fine details. However, their iterative denoising process incurs high computational overhead, posing challenges for real-time applications. Although one-step distillation methods, such as OSEDiff and TSD-SR, offer faster inference, they remain fundamentally constrained by their large, over-parameterized model architectures. In this work, we present TinySR, a compact yet effective diffusion model specifically designed for Real-ISR that achieves real-time performance while maintaining perceptual quality. We introduce a Dynamic Inter-block Activation and an Expansion-Corrosion Strategy to facilitate more effective decision-making in depth pruning. We achieve VAE compression through channel pruning, attention removal and lightweight SepConv. We eliminate time- and prompt-related modules and perform pre-caching techniques to further speed up the model. TinySR significantly reduces computational cost and model size, achieving up to 5.68x speedup and 83% parameter reduction compared to its teacher TSD-SR, while still providing high quality results.

Text-Aware Real-World Image Super-Resolution via Diffusion Model with Joint Segmentation Decoders

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}.

Hero-SR: One-Step Diffusion for Super-Resolution with Human Perception Priors

Owing to the robust priors of diffusion models, recent approaches have shown promise in addressing real-world super-resolution (Real-SR). However, achieving semantic consistency and perceptual naturalness to meet human perception demands remains difficult, especially under conditions of heavy degradation and varied input complexities. To tackle this, we propose Hero-SR, a one-step diffusion-based SR framework explicitly designed with human perception priors. Hero-SR consists of two novel modules: the Dynamic Time-Step Module (DTSM), which adaptively selects optimal diffusion steps for flexibly meeting human perceptual standards, and the Open-World Multi-modality Supervision (OWMS), which integrates guidance from both image and text domains through CLIP to improve semantic consistency and perceptual naturalness. Through these modules, Hero-SR generates high-resolution images that not only preserve intricate details but also reflect human perceptual preferences. Extensive experiments validate that Hero-SR achieves state-of-the-art performance in Real-SR. The code will be publicly available upon paper acceptance.