HybridTabNet: Towards Better Table Detection in Scanned Document Images

Abstract

Tables in document images are an important entity since they contain crucial information. Therefore, accurate table detection can significantly improve the information extraction from documents. In this work, we present a novel end-to-end trainable pipeline, HybridTabNet, for table detection in scanned document images. Our two-stage table detector uses the ResNeXt-101 backbone for feature extraction and Hybrid Task Cascade (HTC) to localize the tables in scanned document images. Moreover, we replace conventional convolutions with deformable convolutions in the backbone network. This enables our network to detect tables of arbitrary layouts precisely. We evaluate our approach comprehensively on ICDAR-13, ICDAR-17 POD, ICDAR-19, TableBank, Marmot, and UNLV. Apart from the ICDAR-17 POD dataset, our proposed HybridTabNet outperformed earlier state-of-the-art results without depending on pre- and post-processing steps. Furthermore, to investigate how the proposed method generalizes unseen data, we conduct an exhaustive leave-one-out-evaluation. In comparison to prior state-of-the-art results, our method reduced the relative error by 27.57% on ICDAR-2019-TrackA-Modern, 42.64% on TableBank (Latex), 41.33% on TableBank (Word), 55.73% on TableBank (Latex + Word), 10% on Marmot, and 9.67% on the UNLV dataset. The achieved results reflect the superior performance of the proposed method.

Keywords

• table detection
• table localization
• deep learning
• hybrid task cascade
• object detection
• deformable convolution