Rethinking Table Recognition using Graph Neural Networks Document structure analysis, such as zone segmentation and table recognition, is a complex problem in document processing and is an active area of research. The recent success of deep learning in solving various computer vision and machine learning problems has not been reflected in document structure analysis since conventional neural networks are not well suited to the input structure of the problem. In this paper, we propose an architecture based on graph networks as a better alternative to standard neural networks for table recognition. We argue that graph networks are a more natural choice for these problems, and explore two gradientbased graph neural networks. Our proposed architecture combines the benefits of convolutional neural networks for visual feature extraction and graph networks for dealing with the problem structure. We empirically demonstrate that our method outperforms the baseline by a significant margin. In addition, we identify the lack of large scale datasets as a major hindrance for deep learning research for structure analysis and present a new large scale synthetic dataset for the problem of table recognition. Finally, we opensource our implementation of dataset generation and the training framework of our graph networks to promote reproducible research in this direction.

TableNet: Deep Learning Model for Endtoend Table Detection and Tabular Data Extraction from Scanned Document Images With the widespread use of mobile phones and scanners to photograph and upload documents, the need for extracting the information trapped in unstructured document images such as retail receipts, insurance claim forms and financial invoices is becoming more acute. A major hurdle to this objective is that these images often contain information in the form of tables and extracting data from tabular subimages presents a unique set of challenges. This includes accurate detection of the tabular region within an image, and subsequently detecting and extracting information from the rows and columns of the detected table. While some progress has been made in table detection, extracting the table contents is still a challenge since this involves more fine grained table structure(rows u0026 columns) recognition. Prior approaches have attempted to solve the table detection and structure recognition problems independently using two separate models. In this paper, we propose TableNet: a novel endtoend deep learning model for both table detection and structure recognition. The model exploits the interdependence between the twin tasks of table detection and table structure recognition to segment out the table and column regions. This is followed by semantic rulebased row extraction from the identified tabular subregions. The proposed model and extraction approach was evaluated on the publicly available ICDAR 2013 and Marmot Table datasets obtaining state of the art results. Additionally, we demonstrate that feeding additional semantic features further improves model performance and that the model exhibits transfer learning across datasets. Another contribution of this paper is to provide additional table structure annotations for the Marmot data, which currently only has annotations for table detection.