ICDAR2019 Competition on Recognition of Documents with Complex Layouts - RDCL2019
Christian Clausner, Apostolos Antonacopoulos, Stefan Pletschacher · 2019
This paper presents an objective comparative evaluation of page segmentation and region classification methods for docu-ments with complex layouts. It describes the competition (mo-dus operandi, dataset and evaluation methodology) held in the context of ICDAR2019, presenting the results of the evaluation of twelve methods - nine submitted, three state-of-the-art sys-tems (commercial and open-source). Three scenarios are re-ported in this paper, one evaluating the ability of methods to accurately segment regions and two evaluating both segmenta-tion and region classification. Text recognition was a bonus challenge and was not taken up by all participants. The results indicate that an innovative approach has a clear advantage but there is still a considerable need to develop robust methods that deal with layout challenges, especially with the non-textual content.