Recognition of Tables and Forms

International audienceTables and forms are a very common way to organize information in structureddocuments. Their recognition is fundamental for the recognition of the documents.Indeed, the physical organization of a table or a form gives a lot ofinformation concerning the logical meaning of the content.This chapter presents the different tasks that are related to the recognitionof tables and forms and the associated well-known methods and remaining challenges. Three main tasks are pointed out: the detection of tables in heterogeneousdocuments; the classification of tables and forms, according to predefinedmodels; and the recognition of table and form contents. The complexity of thesethree tasks is related to the kind of studied document: image-based document ordigital-born documents. At last, this chapter will introduce some existing systemsfor table and form analysis