Inverse Scene Text Removal
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Jun 26, 2025
Abstract
Scene text removal (STR) aims to erase textual elements from images. It was
originally intended for removing privacy-sensitiveor undesired texts from
natural scene images, but is now also appliedto typographic images. STR
typically detects text regions and theninpaints them. Although STR has advanced
through neural networksand synthetic data, misuse risks have increased. This
paper investi-gates Inverse STR (ISTR), which analyzes STR-processed images
andfocuses on binary classification (detecting whether an image has un-dergone
STR) and localizing removed text regions. We demonstrate inexperiments that
these tasks are achievable with high accuracies, en-abling detection of
potential misuse and improving STR. We also at-tempt to recover the removed
text content by training a text recognizerto understand its difficulty.
