Abstract: The ICDAR 2019 Challenge on “Scanned receipts OCR and key information extraction” (SROIE) covers important aspects related to the automated analysis of scanned receipts. The SROIE tasks play a key role in many document analysis systems and hold significant commercial potential. Although a lot of work has been published over the years on administrative document analysis, the community has advanced relatively slowly, as most datasets have been kept private. One of the key contributions of SROIE to the document analysis community is to offer a first, standardized dataset of 1000 whole scanned receipt images and annotations, as well as an evaluation procedure for such tasks. The Challenge is structured around three tasks, namely Scanned Receipt Text Localization (Task 1), Scanned Receipt OCR (Task 2) and Key Information Extraction from Scanned Receipts (Task 3). The competition opened on 10th February, 2019 and closed on 5th May, 2019. We received 29, 24 and 18 valid submissions received for the three competition tasks, respectively. This report presents the competition datasets, define the tasks and the evaluation protocols, offer detailed submission statistics, as well as an analysis of the submitted performance. While the tasks of text localization and recognition seem to be relatively easy to tackle, it is interesting to observe the variety of ideas and approaches proposed for the information extraction task. According to the submissions' performance we believe there is still margin for improving information extraction performance, although the current dataset would have to grow substantially in following editions. Given the success of the SROIE competition evidenced by the wide interest generated and the healthy number of submissions from academic, research institutes and industry over different countries, we consider that the SROIE competition can evolve into a useful resource for the community, drawing further attention and promoting research and development efforts in this field.

Abstract: This paper reports the ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Arbitrary-Shaped Text – RRC-ArT that consists of three major challenges: i) scene text detection, ii) scene text recognition, and iii) scene text spotting. A total of 78 submissions from 46 unique teams/individuals were received for this competition. The top performing score of each challenge is as follows: i) T1 – 82.65%, ii) T2.1 – 74.3%, iii) T2.2 – 85.32%, iv) T3.1 – 53.86%, and v) T3.2 – 54.91%. Apart from the results, this paper also details the ArT dataset, tasks description, evaluation metrics and participants' methods. The dataset, the evaluation kit as well as the results are publicly available at the challenge website.

Abstract: Tabular structures in documents offer a complementary dimension to the raw textual data, representing logical or quantitative relationships among pieces of information. In digital mail room applications, where a large amount of
administrative documents must be processed with reasonable accuracy, the detection and interpretation of tables is crucial. Table recognition has gained interest in document image analysis, in particular in unconstrained formats (absence of rule lines, unknown information of rows and columns). In this work, we propose a graph-based approach for detecting tables in document images. Instead of using the raw content (recognized text), we make use of the location, context and content type, thus it is purely a structure perception approach, not dependent on the language and the quality of the text
reading. Our framework makes use of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in order to describe the local repetitive structural information of tables in invoice documents. Our proposed model has been experimentally validated in two invoice datasets and achieved encouraging results. Additionally, due to the scarcity
of benchmark datasets for this task, we have contributed to the community a novel dataset derived from the RVL-CDIP invoice data. It will be publicly released to facilitate future research.

Abstract: This paper is focused on the detection of counterfeit documents via the recurrent comparison of the security textured background regions of two images. The main contributions are twofold: first we apply and adapt a recurrent comparator architecture with attention mechanism to the counterfeit detection task, which constructs a representation of the background regions by recurrently condition the next observation, learning the difference between genuine and counterfeit images through iterative glimpses. Second we propose a new counterfeit document dataset to ensure the generalization of the learned model towards the detection of the lack of resolution during the counterfeit manufacturing. The presented network, outperforms state-of-the-art classification approaches for counterfeit detection as demonstrated in the evaluation.

Abstract: Handwritten marriage licenses books have been used for centuries by ecclesiastical and secular institutions to register marriages. The information contained in these historical documents is useful for demography studies and
genealogical research, among others. Despite the generally simple structure of the text in these documents, automatic transcription and semantic information extraction is difficult due to the distinct and evolutionary vocabulary, which is composed mainly of proper names that change along the time. In previous
works we studied the use of category-based language models to both improve the automatic transcription accuracy and make easier the extraction of semantic information. Here we analyze the main causes of the semantic errors observed in previous results and apply a Grammatical Inference technique known as MGGI to improve the semantic accuracy of the language model obtained. Using this language model, full handwritten text recognition experiments have been carried out, with results supporting the interest of the proposed approach.