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

Abstract

Current image 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 TIGER (Text-Image Guided supEr-Resolution), a novel two-stage framework that breaks this trade-off through a "text-first, image-later" paradigm. TIGER explicitly decouples glyph restoration from image enhancement: it first reconstructs precise text structures and uses them to guide full-image super-resolution. This ensures high fidelity and readability. To support comprehensive training and evaluation, we present the UZ-ST (UltraZoom-Scene Text) dataset, the first Chinese scene text dataset with extreme zoom. Extensive experiments show TIGER achieves state-of-the-art performance, enhancing readability and image quality.