Towards end-to-end semi-supervised table detection with deformable transformer

Towards end-to-end semi-supervised table detection with deformable transformer
Tahira Shehzadi, Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Didier Stricker, Marcus Liwicki, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
In: International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR-2023). International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR-2023), Pages 51-76, Springer Nature Switzerland, San Jose, USA, 8/2023.

Abstract:

Table detection is the task of classifying and localizing table objects within document images. With the recent development in deep learning methods, we observe remarkable success in table detection. However, a significant amount of labeled data is required to train these models effectively. Many semi-supervised approaches are introduced to mitigate the need for a substantial amount of label data. These approaches use CNN-based detectors that rely on anchor proposals and post-processing stages such as NMS. To tackle these limitations, this paper presents a novel end-to-end semi-supervised table detection method that employs the deformable transformer for detecting table objects. We evaluate our semi-supervised method on PubLayNet, DocBank, ICADR-19 and TableBank datasets, and it achieves superior performance compared to previous methods. It outperforms the fully supervised method (Deformable transformer) by +3.4 points on 10 % labels of TableBank-both dataset and the previous CNN-based semi-supervised approach (Soft Teacher) by +1.8 points on 10 % labels of PubLayNet dataset. We hope this work opens new possibilities towards semi-supervised and unsupervised table detection methods.