{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/docextractor-an-off-the-shelf-historical","title":"docExtractor: An off-the-shelf historical document element extraction","arxiv_id":"2012.08191","date":"2020-12-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Tom Monnier","Mathieu Aubry"],"abstract":"We present docExtractor, a generic approach for extracting visual elements such as text lines or illustrations from historical documents without requiring any real data annotation. We demonstrate it provides high-quality performances as an off-the-shelf system across a wide variety of datasets and leads to results on par with state-of-the-art when fine-tuned. We argue that the performance obtained without fine-tuning on a specific dataset is critical for applications, in particular in digital humanities, and that the line-level page segmentation we address is the most relevant for a general purpose element extraction engine. We rely on a fast generator of rich synthetic documents and design a fully convolutional network, which we show to generalize better than a detection-based approach. Furthermore, we introduce a new public dataset dubbed IlluHisDoc dedicated to the fine evaluation of illustration segmentation in historical documents.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.08191v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.08191v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"docextractor-an-off-the-shelf-historical","repo_url":"https://github.com/monniert/docExtractor","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"document-layout-analysis","task_name":"Document Layout Analysis"},{"task_slug":"segmentation","task_name":"Segmentation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}