Parsing Table Structures in the Wild

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2109.02199
• Publication Date: 2021-10-01
• Authors: Long, Rujiao; Wang, Wen; Xue, Nan; Gao, Feiyu; Yang, Zhibo; Wang, Yongpan; Xia, Gui-Song
• Keywords: FOS: Computer and information sciences; 03 medical and health sciences; 0302 clinical medicine; Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology

Accepted to ICCV 2021<br/>This paper tackles the problem of table structure parsing (TSP) from images in the wild. In contrast to existing studies that mainly focus on parsing well-aligned tabular images with simple layouts from scanned PDF documents, we aim to establish a practical table structure parsing system for real-world scenarios where tabular input images are taken or scanned with severe deformation, bending or occlusions. For designing such a system, we propose an approach named Cycle-CenterNet on the top of CenterNet with a novel cycle-pairing module to simultaneously detect and group tabular cells into structured tables. In the cycle-pairing module, a new pairing loss function is proposed for the network training. Alongside with our Cycle-CenterNet, we also present a large-scale dataset, named Wired Table in the Wild (WTW), which includes well-annotated structure parsing of multiple style tables in several scenes like the photo, scanning files, web pages, \emph{etc.}. In experiments, we demonstrate that our Cycle-CenterNet consistently achieves the best accuracy of table structure parsing on the new WTW dataset by 24.6\% absolute improvement evaluated by the TEDS metric. A more comprehensive experimental analysis also validates the advantages of our proposed methods for the TSP task.<br/>