In this paper, we introduce a fully convolutional network for the document layout analysis task. While state-of-the-art methods are using models pre-trained on natural scene images, our method Doc-UFCN relies on a U-shaped model trained from scratch for detecting objects from historical documents. We consider the line segmentation task and more generally the layout analysis problem as a pixel-wise classification task then our model outputs a pixel-labeling of the input images. We show that Doc-UFCN outperforms state-of-the-art methods on various datasets and also demonstrate that the pre-trained parts on natural scene images are not required to reach good results. In addition, we show that pre-training on multiple document datasets can improve the performances. We evaluate the models using various metrics to have a fair and complete comparison between the methods.
Detection and recognition of text from scans and other images, commonly denoted as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), is a widely used form of automated document processing with a number of methods available. Yet OCR systems still do not achieve 100% accuracy, requiring human corrections in applications where correct readout is essential. Advances in machine learning enabled even more challenging scenarios of text detection and recognition "in-the-wild" - such as detecting text on objects from photographs of complex scenes. While the state-of-the-art methods for in-the-wild text recognition …
Extraction of text regions and individual text lines from historic documents is necessary for automatic transcription. We propose extending a CNN-based text baseline detection system by adding line height and text block boundary predictions to the model output, allowing the system to extract more comprehensive layout information. We also show that pixel-wise text orientation prediction can be used for processing documents with multiple text orientations. We demonstrate that the proposed method performs well on the cBAD baseline detection dataset. Additionally, we benchmark the method on newly …
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Microsoft Azure AI（微软Azure人工智能部门）
Image Transformer has recently achieved significant progress for natural image understanding, either using supervised (ViT, DeiT, etc.) or self-supervised (BEiT, MAE, etc.) pre-training techniques. In this paper, we propose \textbf{DiT}, a self-supervised pre-trained \textbf{D}ocument \textbf{I}mage \textbf{T}ransformer model using large-scale unlabeled text images for Document AI tasks, which is essential since no supervised counterparts ever exist due to the lack of human-labeled document images. We leverage DiT as the backbone network in a variety of vision-based Document AI tasks, includin…
Hikvision Research Institute（海康威视研究院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Since real-world ubiquitous documents (e.g., invoices, tickets, resumes and leaflets) contain rich information, automatic document image understanding has become a hot topic. Most existing works decouple the problem into two separate tasks, (1) text reading for detecting and recognizing texts in images and (2) information extraction for analyzing and extracting key elements from previously extracted plain text. However, they mainly focus on improving information extraction task, while neglecting the fact that text reading and information extraction are mutually correlated. In this paper, we pr…
In this paper, we present StrucTexTv2, an effective document image pre-training framework, by performing masked visual-textual prediction. It consists of two self-supervised pre-training tasks: masked image modeling and masked language modeling, based on text region-level image masking. The proposed method randomly masks some image regions according to the bounding box coordinates of text words. The objectives of our pre-training tasks are reconstructing the pixels of masked image regions and the corresponding masked tokens simultaneously. Hence the pre-trained encoder can capture more textual…
University of Mysore（迈索尔大学）；Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）
Segmentation of a text-document into lines, words and characters, which is considered to be the crucial pre-processing stage in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is traditionally carried out on uncompressed documents, although most of the documents in real life are available in compressed form, for the reasons such as transmission and storage efficiency. However, this implies that the compressed image should be decompressed, which indents additional computing resources. This limitation has motivated us to take up research in document image analysis using compressed documents. In this paper, …
Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）；Digital Research Center of Sfax（斯法克斯数字研究中心）
In this paper, we propose a Text-Degradation Invariant Auto Encoder (Text-DIAE), a self-supervised model designed to tackle two tasks, text recognition (handwritten or scene-text) and document image enhancement. We start by employing a transformer-based architecture that incorporates three pretext tasks as learning objectives to be optimized during pre-training without the usage of labeled data. Each of the pretext objectives is specifically tailored for the final downstream tasks. We conduct several ablation experiments that confirm the design choice of the selected pretext tasks. Importantly…
CTP-Net: Character Texture Perception Network for Document Image Forgery Localization
The College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University（湖南大学计算机与电子工程学院）；The Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong（香港大学计算机科学系）
PRHLT Research Center（PRHLT研究中心）；Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）
Document Layout Analysis is a fundamental step in Handwritten Text Processing systems, from the extraction of the text lines to the type of zone it belongs to. We present a system based on artificial neural networks which is able to determine not only the baselines of text lines present in the document, but also performs geometric and logic layout analysis of the document. Experiments in three different datasets demonstrate the potential of the method and show competitive results with respect to state-of-the-art methods.
Text line segmentation is one of the key steps in historical document understanding. It is challenging due to the variety of fonts, contents, writing styles and the quality of documents that have degraded through the years. In this paper, we address the limitations that currently prevent people from building line segmentation models with a high generalization capacity. We present a study conducted using three state-of-the-art systems Doc-UFCN, dhSegment and ARU-Net and show that it is possible to build generic models trained on a wide variety of historical document datasets that can correctly …
Unsupervised pre-training on millions of digital-born or scanned documents has shown promising advances in visual document understanding~(VDU). While various vision-language pre-training objectives are studied in existing solutions, the document textline, as an intrinsic granularity in VDU, has seldom been explored so far. A document textline usually contains words that are spatially and semantically correlated, which can be easily obtained from OCR engines. In this paper, we propose Wukong-Reader, trained with new pre-training objectives to leverage the structural knowledge nested in document…
IBM Research - Haifa（IBM研究院（海法））；IBM Research - Zurich（IBM研究院（苏黎世））
For digitizing or indexing physical documents, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), the process of extracting textual information from scanned documents, is a vital technology. When a document is visually damaged or contains non-textual elements, existing technologies can yield poor results, as erroneous detection results can greatly affect the quality of OCR. In this paper we present a detection network dubbed BusiNet aimed at OCR of business documents. Business documents often include sensitive information and as such they cannot be uploaded to a cloud service for OCR. BusiNet was designed t…
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Research（微软Azure认知服务研究院）；Microsoft Azure Visual Document Intelligence（微软Azure视觉文档智能部门）
We propose Universal Document Processing (UDOP), a foundation Document AI model which unifies text, image, and layout modalities together with varied task formats, including document understanding and generation. UDOP leverages the spatial correlation between textual content and document image to model image, text, and layout modalities with one uniform representation. With a novel Vision-Text-Layout Transformer, UDOP unifies pretraining and multi-domain downstream tasks into a prompt-based sequence generation scheme. UDOP is pretrained on both large-scale unlabeled document corpora using inno…
Data Analytic Laboratory（数据分析实验室）；Samsung Life Insurance（三星人寿保险）
Text localization from the digital image is the first step for the optical character recognition task. Conventional image processing based text localization performs adequately for specific examples. Yet, a general text localization are only archived by recent deep-learning based modalities. Here we present document Text Localization Generative Adversarial Nets (TLGAN) which are deep neural networks to perform the text localization from digital image. TLGAN is an versatile and easy-train text localization model requiring a small amount of data. Training only ten labeled receipt images from Rob…
Shahjalal University of Science & Technology（沙赫贾拉勒科技大学）
Today all kind of information is getting digitized and along with all this digitization, the huge archive of various kinds of documents is being digitized too. We know that, Optical Character Recognition is the method through which, newspapers and other paper documents convert into digital resources. But, it is a fact that this method works on texts only. As a result, if we try to process any document which contains non-textual zones, then we will get garbage texts as output. That is why; in order to digitize documents properly they should be prepossessed carefully. And while preprocessing, se…
Visually rich documents (VRDs) are ubiquitous in daily business and life. Examples are purchase receipts, insurance policy documents, custom declaration forms and so on. In VRDs, visual and layout information is critical for document understanding, and texts in such documents cannot be serialized into the one-dimensional sequence without losing information. Classic information extraction models such as BiLSTM-CRF typically operate on text sequences and do not incorporate visual features. In this paper, we introduce a graph convolution based model to combine textual and visual information prese…
Page layout analysis is a fundamental step in document processing which enables to segment a page into regions of interest. With highly complex layouts and mixed scripts, scholarly commentaries are text-heavy documents which remain challenging for state-of-the-art models. Their layout considerably varies across editions and their most important regions are mainly defined by semantic rather than graphical characteristics such as position or appearance. This setting calls for a comparison between textual, visual and hybrid approaches. We therefore assess the performances of two transformers (Lay…
We introduce FontCode, an information embedding technique for text documents. Provided a text document with specific fonts, our method embeds user-specified information in the text by perturbing the glyphs of text characters while preserving the text content. We devise an algorithm to chooses unobtrusive yet machine-recognizable glyph perturbations, leveraging a recently developed generative model that alters the glyphs of each character continuously on a font manifold. We then introduce an algorithm that embeds a user-provided message in the text document and produces an encoded document whos…
Since the low quality of document images will greatly undermine the chances of success in automatic text recognition and analysis, it is necessary to assess the quality of document images uploaded in online business process, so as to reject those images of low quality. In this paper, we attempt to achieve document image quality assessment and our contributions are twofold. Firstly, since document image quality assessment is more interested in text, we propose a text line based framework to estimate document image quality, which is composed of three stages: text line detection, text line qualit…
Classification of document images is a critical step for archival of old manuscripts, online subscription and administrative procedures. Computer vision and deep learning have been suggested as a first solution to classify documents based on their visual appearance. However, achieving the fine-grained classification that is required in real-world setting cannot be achieved by visual analysis alone. Often, the relevant information is in the actual text content of the document. We design a multimodal neural network that is able to learn from word embeddings, computed on text extracted by OCR, an…
Active consumption of digital documents has yielded scope for research in various applications, including search. Traditionally, searching within a document has been cast as a text matching problem ignoring the rich layout and visual cues commonly present in structured documents, forms, etc. To that end, we ask a mostly unexplored question: "Can we search for other similar snippets present in a target document page given a single query instance of a document snippet?". We propose MONOMER to solve this as a one-shot snippet detection task. MONOMER fuses context from visual, textual, and spatial…
University of Mysore（迈索尔大学）；Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）
Automatic detection of font size finds many applications in the area of intelligent OCRing and document image analysis, which has been traditionally practiced over uncompressed documents, although in real life the documents exist in compressed form for efficient storage and transmission. It would be novel and intelligent if the task of font size detection could be carried out directly from the compressed data of these documents without decompressing, which would result in saving of considerable amount of processing time and space. Therefore, in this paper we present a novel idea of learning an…
Recovering the original printed texts from a document with added handwritten annotations in the marginal area is one of the challenging problems, especially when the original document is not available. Therefore, this paper aims at salvaging automatically the original document from the annotated document by detecting and removing any handwritten annotations that appear in the marginal area of the document without any loss of information. Here a two stage algorithm is proposed, where in the first stage due to approximate marginal boundary detection with horizontal and vertical projection profil…
Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad（印度阿拉巴德信息技术学院）
Page segmentation is considered to be the crucial stage for the automatic analysis of documents with complex layouts. This has traditionally been carried out in uncompressed documents, although most of the documents in real life exist in a compressed form warranted by the requirement to make storage and transfer efficient. However, carrying out page segmentation directly in compressed documents without going through the stage of decompression is a challenging goal. This research paper proposes demonstrating the possibility of carrying out a page segmentation operation directly in the run-lengt…
GET-Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications（GET-法国国立高等电信学院）；CNRS-LTCI（法国国家科学研究中心LTCI研究所）；IUT, Université du Havre（勒阿弗尔大学大学技术学院）
There is a huge amount of historical documents in libraries and in various National Archives that have not been exploited electronically. Although automatic reading of complete pages remains, in most cases, a long-term objective, tasks such as word spotting, text/image alignment, authentication and extraction of specific fields are in use today. For all these tasks, a major step is document segmentation into text lines. Because of the low quality and the complexity of these documents (background noise, artifacts due to aging, interfering lines),automatic text line segmentation remains an open …
Jadavpur University（贾达布尔大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Cognizant Technology Solutions（高知特科技解决方案公司）；Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee（印度理工学院鲁尔基分校）
Binarization of degraded document images is an elementary step in most of the problems in document image analysis domain. The paper re-visits the binarization problem by introducing an adversarial learning approach. We construct a Texture Augmentation Network that transfers the texture element of a degraded reference document image to a clean binary image. In this way, the network creates multiple versions of the same textual content with various noisy textures, thus enlarging the available document binarization datasets. At last, the newly generated images are passed through a Binarization ne…
Line separators are used to segregate text-lines from one another in document image analysis. Finding the separator points at every line terminal in a document image would enable text-line segmentation. In particular, identifying the separators in handwritten text could be a thrilling exercise. Obviously it would be challenging to perform this in the compressed version of a document image and that is the proposed objective in this research. Such an effort would prevent the computational burden of decompressing a document for text-line segmentation. Since document images are generally compresse…
International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）；Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）；Computer Vision Centre（计算机视觉中心）
This work addresses the problem of Question Answering (QA) on handwritten document collections. Unlike typical QA and Visual Question Answering (VQA) formulations where the answer is a short text, we aim to locate a document snippet where the answer lies. The proposed approach works without recognizing the text in the documents. We argue that the recognition-free approach is suitable for handwritten documents and historical collections where robust text recognition is often difficult. At the same time, for human users, document image snippets containing answers act as a valid alternative to te…
Karnatak Arts, Science and Commerce College（卡纳塔克艺术、科学与商业学院）；INRIA Nancy-Grand Est（法国国家信息与自动化研究所南锡-大东部分部）；LORIA（洛林计算机科学及其应用研究所）
In this paper, we use statistical texture features for handwritten and printed text classification. We primarily aim for word level classification in south Indian scripts. Words are first extracted from the scanned document. For each extracted word, statistical texture features are computed such as mean, standard deviation, smoothness, moment, uniformity, entropy and local range including local entropy. These feature vectors are then used to classify words via k-NN classifier. We have validated the approach over several different datasets. Scripts like Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi i.e.…
University of Rouen Normandy（鲁昂诺曼底大学）；Normandie Université（诺曼底大学）；INSA Rouen Normandy（鲁昂诺曼底国立应用科学学院）
Unconstrained handwritten text recognition is a challenging computer vision task. It is traditionally handled by a two-step approach, combining line segmentation followed by text line recognition. For the first time, we propose an end-to-end segmentation-free architecture for the task of handwritten document recognition: the Document Attention Network. In addition to text recognition, the model is trained to label text parts using begin and end tags in an XML-like fashion. This model is made up of an FCN encoder for feature extraction and a stack of transformer decoder layers for a recurrent t…
Recognizing the full-page of Japanese historical documents is a challenging problem due to the complex layout/background and difficulty of writing styles, such as cursive and connected characters. Most of the previous methods divided the recognition process into character segmentation and recognition. However, those methods provide only character bounding boxes and classes without text transcription. In this paper, we enlarge our previous humaninspired recognition system from multiple lines to the full-page of Kuzushiji documents. The human-inspired recognition system simulates human eye movem…
University of Sfax（斯法克斯大学）；University of La Rochelle（拉罗谢尔大学）
This paper deals with the recognition and matching of text in both cartographic maps and ancient documents. The purpose of this work is to find similar text regions based on statistical and global features. A phase of normalization is done first, in object to well categorize the same quantity of information. A phase of wordspotting is done next by combining local and global features. We make different experiments by combining the different techniques of extracting features in order to obtain better results in recognition phase. We applied fontspotting on both ancient documents and cartographic…
Indian Institute of Technology, Patna（印度理工学院巴特那分校）；Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata（印度统计研究所加尔各答分所）
Image restoration is very crucial computer vision task. This paper describes two novel methods for the restoration of old degraded handwritten documents using deep neural network. In addition to that, a small-scale dataset of 26 heritage letters images is introduced. The ground truth data to train the desired network is generated semi automatically involving a pragmatic combination of color transformation, Gaussian mixture model based segmentation and shape correction by using mathematical morphological operators. In the first approach, a deep neural network has been used for text extraction f…
University of Mysore（迈索尔大学）；Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）
Document Image Analysis, like any Digital Image Analysis requires identification and extraction of proper features, which are generally extracted from uncompressed images, though in reality images are made available in compressed form for the reasons such as transmission and storage efficiency. However, this implies that the compressed image should be decompressed, which indents additional computing resources. This limitation induces the motivation to research in extracting features directly from the compressed image. In this research, we propose to extract essential features such as projectio…
TextDoctor: Unified Document Image Inpainting via Patch Pyramid Diffusion Models
College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Wenzhou University（温州大学计算机与人工智能学院）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Nasdaq（纳斯达克）；Memorial University of Newfoundland（纽芬兰纪念大学）
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Self-supervised pre-training techniques have achieved remarkable progress in Document AI. Most multimodal pre-trained models use a masked language modeling objective to learn bidirectional representations on the text modality, but they differ in pre-training objectives for the image modality. This discrepancy adds difficulty to multimodal representation learning. In this paper, we propose \textbf{LayoutLMv3} to pre-train multimodal Transformers for Document AI with unified text and image masking. Additionally, LayoutLMv3 is pre-trained with a word-patch alignment objective to learn cross-modal…
This paper presents a framework for semi-automatic transcription of large-scale historical handwritten documents and proposes a simple user-friendly text extractor tool, TexT for transcription. The proposed approach provides a quick and easy transcription of text using computer assisted interactive technique. The algorithm finds multiple occurrences of the marked text on-the-fly using a word spotting system. TexT is also capable of performing on-the-fly annotation of handwritten text with automatic generation of ground truth labels, and dynamic adjustment and correction of user generated bound…
We present a novel deep neural model for text detection in document images. For robust text detection in noisy scanned documents, the advantages of multi-task learning are adopted by adding an auxiliary task of text enhancement. Namely, our proposed model is designed to perform noise reduction and text region enhancement as well as text detection. Moreover, we enrich the training data for the model with synthesized document images that are fully labeled for text detection and enhancement, thus overcome the insufficiency of labeled document image data. For the effective exploitation of the synt…
Extracting key information from documents, such as receipts or invoices, and preserving the interested texts to structured data is crucial in the document-intensive streamline processes of office automation in areas that includes but not limited to accounting, financial, and taxation areas. To avoid designing expert rules for each specific type of document, some published works attempt to tackle the problem by learning a model to explore the semantic context in text sequences based on the Named Entity Recognition (NER) method in the NLP field. In this paper, we propose to harness the effective…
Although many methods have been proposed to deal with nature image super-resolution (SR) and get impressive performance, the text images SR is not good due to their ignorance of document images. In this paper, we propose a matting-based dual generative adversarial network (mdGAN) for document image SR. Firstly, the input image is decomposed into document text, foreground and background layers using deep image matting. Then two parallel branches are constructed to recover text boundary information and color information respectively. Furthermore, in order to improve the restoration accuracy of c…
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Images can give us insights into the contextual meanings of words, but current image-text grounding approaches require detailed annotations. Such granular annotation is rare, expensive, and unavailable in most domain-specific contexts. In contrast, unlabeled multi-image, multi-sentence documents are abundant. Can lexical grounding be learned from such documents, even though they have significant lexical and visual overlap? Working with a case study dataset of real estate listings, we demonstrate the challenge of distinguishing highly correlated grounded terms, such as "kitchen" and "bedroom", …
