Table Extraction from Document Images using Fixed Point Model

The paper presents a novel learning-based framework to identify tables from scanned document images. The ap-proach is designed as a structured labeling problem, which learns the layout of the document and labels its various en-tities as table header, table trailer, table cell and non-table region. We develop features which encode the foreground block characteristics and the contextual information. These features are provided to a fixed point model which learns the inter-relationship between the blocks. The fixed point model attains a contraction mapping and provides a unique label to each block. We compare the results with Condition Random Fields(CRFs). Unlike CRFs, the fixed point model captures the context information in terms of the neighbourhood lay-out more efficiently. Experiments on the images picked from UW-III (University of Washington) dataset, UNLV dataset and our dataset consisting of document images with multi-column page layout, show the applicability of our algorithm in layout analysis and table detection