SemiSynthetic Data Augmentation of Scanned Historical Documents This paper proposes a fully automatic new method for generating semisynthetic images of historical documents to increase the number of training samples in small datasets. This method extracts and mixes background only images (BOI) with text only images (TOI) issued from two different sources to create semisynthetic images. The TOIs are extracted with the help of a binary mask obtained by binarizing the image. The BOIs are reconstructed from the original image by replacing TOI pixels using an inpainting method. Finally, a TOI can be efficiently integrated in a BOI using the gradient domain, thus creating a new semisynthetic image. The idea behind this technique is to automatically obtain documents close to real ones with different backgrounds to highlight the content. Experiments are conducted on the public HisDB dataset which contains few labeled images. We show that the proposed method improves the performance results of a semantic segmentation and baseline extraction task.

A Synthetic Recipe for OCR Synthetic data generation for optical character recognition (OCR) promises unlimited training data at zero annotation cost. With enough fonts and seed text, we should be able to generate data to train a model that approaches or exceeds the performance with real annotated data. Unfortunately, this is not always the reality. Unconstrained image settings, such as internet memes, scanned web pages, or newspapers, present diverse scripts, fonts, layouts, and complex backgrounds, which cause models trained with synthetic data to break down. In this work, we investigate the synthetic image generation problem on a large multilingual set of unconstrained document images. Our work presents a comprehensive evaluation of the impact of synthetic data attributes on model performance. The results provide a recipe for synthetic data generation that will help guide future research.