M6Doc: A Large-Scale Multi-Format, Multi-Type, Multi-Layout, Multi-Language, Multi-Annotation Category Dataset for Modern Document Layout Analysis
Authors: Hiuyi Cheng, Peirong Zhang, Sihang Wu, Jiaxin Zhang, Qiyuan Zhu, Zecheng Xie, Jing Li, Kai Ding, Lianwen Jin

Document layout analysis is a crucial prerequisite for document understanding, including document retrieval and conversion. Most public datasets currently contain only PDF documents and lack realistic documents. Models trained on these datasets may not generalize well to real-world scenarios. Therefore, this paper introduces a large and diverse document layout analysis dataset called M^6-Doc. The M^6 designation represents six properties: (1) Multi-Format (including scanned, photographed, and PDF documents); (2) Multi-Type (such as scientific articles, textbooks, books, test papers, magazines, newspapers, and notes); (3) Multi-Layout (rectangular, Manhattan, non-Manhattan, and multi-column Manhattan); (4) Multi-Language (Chinese and English); (5) Multi-Annotation Category (74 types of annotation labels with 237,116 annotation instances in 9,080 manually annotated pages); and (6) Modern documents. Additionally, we propose a transformer-based document layout analysis method called TransDLANet, which leverages an adaptive element matching mechanism that enables query embedding to better match ground truth to improve recall, and constructs a segmentation branch for more precise document image instance segmentation. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of M^6-Doc with various layout analysis methods and demonstrate its effectiveness. TransDLANet achieves state-of-the-art performance on M^6-Doc with 64.5% mAP. The M^6-Doc dataset will be available at https://github.com/HCIILAB/M6Doc.