Self-Supervised Cross-Language Scene Text Editing

We propose and formulate the task of cross-language scene text editing, modifying the text content of a scene image into new text in another language, while preserving the scene text style and background texture. The key challenges of this task lie in the difficulty in distinguishing text and background, great distribution differences among languages, and the lack of fine-labeled real-world data. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel network named Cross-LAnguage Scene Text Editing (CLASTE), which is capable of separating the foreground text and background, as well as further decomposing the content and style of the foreground text. Our model can be trained in a self-supervised training manner on the unlabeled and multi-language data in real-world scenarios, where the source images serve as both input and ground truth. Experimental results on the Chinese-English cross-language dataset show that our proposed model can generate realistic text images, specifically, modifying English to Chinese and vice versa. Furthermore, our method is universal and can be extended to other languages such as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Bengali, and so on.