The subject about document image understanding is to extract and classify individual data meaningfully from paper-based documents. Until today, many methods/approaches have been proposed with regard to recognition of various kinds of documents, various technical problems for extensions of OCR, and requirements for practical usages. Of course, though the technical research issues in the early stage are looked upon as complementary attacks for the traditional OCR which is dependent on character recognition techniques, the application ranges or related issues are widely investigated or should be established progressively. This paper addresses current topics about document image understanding from a technical point of view as a survey. key words: document model, top-down, bottom-up, layout structure, logical structure, document types, layout recognition

Document Analysis and Recognition

Call for papers for Special Issue of ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications on Interactive Digital Television

ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (ACM TOMCCAP)

We describe a method for automatically obtaining object representations suitable for retrieval from generic video shots. The object representation consists of an association of frame regions. These regions provide exemplars of the object's possible visual appearances.

Two ideas are developed: (i) associating regions within a single shot to represent a deforming object; (ii) associating regions from the multiple visual aspects of a 3D object, thereby implicitly representing 3D structure. For the association we exploit temporal continuity (tracking) and wide baseline matching of affine covariant regions.

In the implementation there are three areas of novelty: First, we describe a method to repair short gaps in tracks. Second, we show how to join tracks across occlusions (where many tracks terminate simultaneously). Third, we develop an affine factorization method that copes with motion degeneracy.

We obtain tracks that last throughout the shot, without requiring a 3D reconstruction. The factorization method is used to associate tracks into object-level groups, with common motion. The outcome is that separate parts of an object that are not simultaneously visible (such as the front and back of a car, or the front and side of a face) are associated together. In turn this enables object-level matching and recognition throughout a video.

We illustrate the method on the feature film "Groundhog Day." Examples are given for the retrieval of deforming objects (heads, walking people) and rigid objects (vehicles, locations).

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Object Level Grouping for Video Shots

In India, more than 300 million people use Devanagari script for documentation. There has been a significant improvement in the research related to the recognition of printed as well as handwritten Devanagari text in the past few years. State of the art from 1970s of machine printed and handwritten Devanagari optical character recognition (OCR) is discussed in this paper. All feature-extraction techniques as well as training, classification and matching techniques useful for the recognition are discussed in various sections of the paper. An attempt is made to address the most important results reported so far and it is also tried to highlight the beneficial directions of the research till date. Moreover, the paper also contains a comprehensive bibliography of many selected papers appeared in reputed journals and conference proceedings as an aid for the researchers working in the field of Devanagari OCR.

Offline Recognition of Devanagari Script: A Survey

Table detection is a crucial step in many document analysis applications as tables are used for presenting essential information to the reader in a structured manner. It is a hard problem due to varying layouts and encodings of the tables. Researchers have proposed numerous techniques for table detection based on layout analysis of documents. Most of these techniques fail to generalize because they rely on hand engineered features which are not robust to layout variations. In this paper, we have presented a deep learning based method for table detection. In the proposed method, document images are first pre-processed. These images are then fed to a Region Proposal Network followed by a fully connected neural network for table detection. The proposed method works with high precision on document images with varying layouts that include documents, research papers, and magazines. We have done our evaluations on publicly available UNLV dataset where it beats Tesseract's state of the art table detection system by a significant margin.

Table Detection Using Deep Learning

The open-ended question answering task of Text-VQA requires reading and reasoning about local, often previously unseen, scene-text content of an image to generate answers. In this work, we propose the generalized use of external knowledge to augment our understanding of the said scene-text. We design a framework to extract, filter, and encode knowledge atop a standard multimodal transformer for vision language understanding tasks. Through empirical evidence, we demonstrate how knowledge can highlight instance-only cues and thus help deal with training data bias, improve answer entity type correctness, and detect multiword named entities. We generate results comparable to the state-of-the-art on two publicly available datasets, under the constraints of similar upstream OCR systems and training data.

External Knowledge Augmented Text Visual Question Answering

Layouts and sub-layouts constitute an important clue while searching a document on the basis of its structure, or when textual content is unknown/irrelevant. A sub-layout specifies the arrangement of document entities within a smaller portion of the document. We propose an efficient graph-based matching algorithm, integrated with hash-based indexing, to prune a possibly large search space. A user can specify a combination of sub-layouts of interest using sketch-based queries. The system supports partial matching for unspecified layout entities. We handle cases of segmentation pre-processing errors (for text/non-text blocks) with a symmetry maximization-based strategy, and accounting for multiple domain-specific plausible segmentation hypotheses. We show promising results of our system on a database of unstructured entities, containing 4776 newspaper images.

Extraction of Layout Entities and Sub-layout Query-based Retrieval of Document Images.

State-of-the-art offline Optical Character Recognition (OCR) frameworks perform poorly on semi-structured handwritten domain-specific documents due to their inability to localize and label form fields with domain-specific semantics. Existing techniques for semi-structured document analysis have primarily used datasets comprising invoices, purchase orders, receipts, and identity-card documents for benchmarking. In this work, we build the first semi-structured document analysis dataset in the legal domain by collecting a large number of First Information Report (FIR) documents from several police stations in India. This dataset, which we call the FIR dataset, is more challenging than most existing document analysis datasets, since it combines a wide variety of handwritten text with printed text. We also propose an end-to-end framework for offline processing of handwritten semi-structured documents, and benchmark it on our novel FIR dataset. Our framework used Encoder-Decoder architecture for localizing and labelling the form fields and for recognizing the handwritten content. The encoder consists of Faster-RCNN and Vision Transformers. Further the Transformer-based decoder architecture is trained with a domain-specific tokenizer. We also propose a post-correction method to handle recognition errors pertaining to the domain-specific terms. Our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on the FIR dataset outperforming several existing models

TransDocAnalyser: A Framework for Offline Semi-structured Handwritten Document Analysis in the Legal Domain

Zone extraction is acclaimed as a significant pre-processing step in handwriting analysis This paper presents a new method for separating ascenders and descenders from an unconstrained handwritten word and identifying its core-region The method estimates correct core-region for complexities like long horizontal strokes, skewed words, first letter capital, hill and dale writing, jumping baselines and words with long descender curves, cursive handwriting, calligraphic words, title case words, very short words as shown in Fig 1 It extracts two envelops from the word image and selects sample points that constitute the core region envelop The method is tested on CVL, ICDAR-2013, ICFHR-2012, and IAM benchmark datasets of handwritten words written by multiple writers We also created our own dataset of 100 words authored by 2 writers comprising all the above mentioned handwriting complexities Due to non-availability of the Ground Truth for core-region extraction we created it manually for all the datasets Our work reports an accuracy of 9016% for correctly identifying all the three zones on 17,100 Latin words written by 802 individuals Promising results are obtained by our core-region detection method when compared with the current state of the art methods

Core Region Detection for Off-Line Unconstrained Handwritten Latin Words Using Word Envelops

The open-ended question answering task of Text-VQA requires reading and reasoning about local, often previously unseen, scene-text content of an image to generate answers. In this work, we propose the generalized use of external knowledge to augment our understanding of the said scene-text. We design a framework to extract, validate, and reason with knowledge using a standard multimodal transformer for vision language understanding tasks. Through empirical evidence and qualitative results, we demonstrate how external knowledge can highlight instance-only cues and thus help deal with training data bias, improve answer entity type correctness, and detect multiword named entities. We generate results comparable to the state-of-the-art on two publicly available datasets, under the constraints of similar upstream OCR systems and training data.

Gaurav Harit

Papers

External Knowledge Augmented Text Visual Question Answering

Extraction of Layout Entities and Sub-layout Query-based Retrieval of Document Images.

TransDocAnalyser: A Framework for Offline Semi-structured Handwritten Document Analysis in the Legal Domain

Core Region Detection for Off-Line Unconstrained Handwritten Latin Words Using Word Envelops

External Knowledge enabled Text Visual Question Answering