Anoop R Katti

Christian Reisswig, Anoop R Katti, Marco Spinaci et al.

We present an end-to-end trainable approach for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on printed documents. Specifically, we propose a model that predicts a) a two-dimensional character grid (\emph{chargrid}) representation of a document image as a semantic segmentation task and b) character boxes for delineating character instances as an object detection task. For training the model, we build two large-scale datasets without resorting to any manual annotation - synthetic documents with clean labels and real documents with noisy labels. We demonstrate experimentally that our method, trained on the combination of these datasets, (i) outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches in accuracy (ii) is easily parallelizable on GPU and is, therefore, significantly faster and (iii) is easy to train and adapt to a new domain.

Anoop Raveendra Katti, Christian Reisswig, Cordula Guder et al.

We introduce a novel type of text representation that preserves the 2D layout of a document. This is achieved by encoding each document page as a two-dimensional grid of characters. Based on this representation, we present a generic document understanding pipeline for structured documents. This pipeline makes use of a fully convolutional encoder-decoder network that predicts a segmentation mask and bounding boxes. We demonstrate its capabilities on an information extraction task from invoices and show that it significantly outperforms approaches based on sequential text or document images.

Anoop Katti, Anurag Mittal

Part-based models with restrictive tree-structured interactions for the Human Pose Estimation problem, leaves many part interactions unhandled. Two of the most common and strong manifestations of such unhandled interactions are self-occlusion among the parts and the confusion in the localization of the non-adjacent symmetric parts. By handling the self-occlusion in a data efficient manner, we improve the performance of the basic Mixture of Parts model by a large margin, especially on uncommon poses. Through addressing the confusion in the symmetric limb localization using a combination of two complementing trees, we improve the performance on all the parts by atmost doubling the running time. Finally, we show that the combination of the two solutions improves the results. We report results that are equivalent to the state-of-the-art on two standard datasets. Because of maintaining the tree-structured interactions and only part-level modeling of the base Mixture of Parts model, this is achieved in time that is much less than the best performing part-based model.