  Scene text removal (STR) contains two processes: text localization and
background reconstruction. Through integrating both processes into a single
network, previous methods provide an implicit erasure guidance by modifying all
pixels in the entire image. However, there exists two problems: 1) the implicit
erasure guidance causes the excessive erasure to non-text areas; 2) the
one-stage erasure lacks the exhaustive removal of text region. In this paper,
we propose a ProgrEssively Region-based scene Text eraser (PERT), introducing
an explicit erasure guidance and performing balanced multi-stage erasure for
accurate and exhaustive text removal. Firstly, we introduce a new region-based
modification strategy (RegionMS) to explicitly guide the erasure process.
Different from previous implicitly guided methods, RegionMS performs targeted
and regional erasure on only text region, and adaptively perceives stroke-level
information to improve the integrity of non-text areas with only bounding box
level annotations. Secondly, PERT performs balanced multi-stage erasure with
several progressive erasing stages. Each erasing stage takes an equal step
toward the text-erased image to ensure the exhaustive erasure of text regions.
Compared with previous methods, PERT outperforms them by a large margin without
the need of adversarial loss, obtaining SOTA results with high speed (71 FPS)
and at least 25% lower parameter complexity. Code is available at
https://github.com/wangyuxin87/PERT.
