Abstract: This paper introduces the DocILE benchmark with the largest dataset of business documents for the tasks of Key Information Localization and Extraction and Line Item Recognition. It contains 6.7k annotated business documents, 100k synthetically generated documents, and nearly 1M unlabeled documents for unsupervised pre-training. The dataset has been built with knowledge of domain- and task-specific aspects, resulting in the following key features: (i) annotations in 55 classes, which surpasses the granularity of previously published key information extraction datasets by a large margin; (ii) Line Item Recognition represents a highly practical information extraction task, where key information has to be assigned to items in a table; (iii) documents come from numerous layouts and the test set includes zero- and few-shot cases as well as layouts commonly seen in the training set. The benchmark comes with several baselines, including RoBERTa, LayoutLMv3 and DETR-based Table Transformer; applied to both tasks of the DocILE benchmark, with results shared in this paper, offering a quick starting point for future work. The dataset, baselines and supplementary material are available at https://github.com/rossumai/docile.

Abstract: Recently, video text detection, tracking and recognition in natural scenes are becoming very popular in the computer vision community. However, most existing algorithms and benchmarks focus on common text cases (e.g., normal size, density) and single scenario, while ignore extreme video texts challenges, i.e., dense and small text in various scenarios. In this competition report, we establish a video text reading benchmark, named DSText, which focuses on dense and small text reading challenge in the video with various scenarios. Compared with the previous datasets, the proposed dataset mainly include three new challenges: 1) Dense video texts, new challenge for video text spotter. 2) High-proportioned small texts. 3) Various new scenarios, e.g., ‘Game’, ‘Sports’, etc. The proposed DSText includes 100 video clips from 12 open scenarios, supporting two tasks (i.e., video text tracking (Task 1) and end-to-end video text spotting (Task2)). During the competition period (opened on 15th February, 2023 and closed on 20th March, 2023), a total of 24 teams participated in the three proposed tasks with around 30 valid submissions, respectively. In this article, we describe detailed statistical information of the dataset, tasks, evaluation protocols and the results summaries of the ICDAR 2023 on DSText competition. Moreover, we hope the benchmark will promise the video text research in the community.

Abstract: Reading seal title text is a challenging task due to the variable shapes of seals, curved text, background noise, and overlapped text. However, this important element is commonly found in official and financial scenarios, and has not received the attention it deserves in the field of OCR technology. To promote research in this area, we organized ICDAR 2023 competition on reading the seal title (ReST), which included two tasks: seal title text detection (Task 1) and end-to-end seal title recognition (Task 2). We constructed a dataset of 10,000 real seal data, covering the most common classes of seals, and labeled all seal title texts with text polygons and text contents. The competition opened on 30th December, 2022 and closed on 20th March, 2023. The competition attracted 53 participants and received 135 submissions from academia and industry, including 28 participants and 72 submissions for Task 1, and 25 participants and 63 submissions for Task 2, which demonstrated significant interest in this challenging task. In this report, we present an overview of the competition, including the organization, challenges, and results. We describe the dataset and tasks, and summarize the submissions and evaluation results. The results show that significant progress has been made in the field of seal title text reading, and we hope that this competition will inspire further research and development in this important area of OCR technology.

Abstract: Vision and Language are broadly regarded as cornerstones of intelligence. Even though language and vision have different aims – language having the purpose of communication, transmission of information and vision having the purpose of constructing mental representations around us to navigate and interact with objects – they cooperate and depend on one another in many tasks we perform effortlessly. This reliance is actively being studied in various Computer Vision tasks, e.g. image captioning, visual question answering, image-sentence retrieval, phrase grounding, just to name a few. All of these tasks share the inherent difficulty of the aligning the two modalities, while being robust to language
priors and various biases existing in the datasets. One of the ultimate goal for vision and language research is to be able to inject world knowledge while getting rid of the biases that come with the datasets. In this thesis, we mainly focus on two vision and language tasks, namely Image Captioning and Scene-Text Visual Question Answering (STVQA).
In both domains, we start by defining a new task that requires the utilization of world knowledge and in both tasks, we find that the models commonly employed are prone to biases that exist in the data. Concretely, we introduce new tasks and discover several problems that impede performance at each level and provide remedies or possible solutions in each chapter: i) We define a new task to move beyond Image Captioning to Image Interpretation that can utilize Named Entities in the form of world knowledge. ii) We study the object hallucination problem in classic Image Captioning systems and develop an architecture-agnostic solution. iii) We define a sub-task of Visual Question Answering that requires reading the text in the image (STVQA), where we highlight the limitations of current models. iv) We propose an architecture for the STVQA task that can point to the answer in the image and show how to combine it with classic VQA models. v) We show how far language can get us in STVQA and discover yet another bias which causes the models to disregard the image while doing Visual Question Answering.

Abstract: Explaining an image with missing or non-existent objects is known as object bias (hallucination) in image captioning. This behaviour is quite common in the state-of-the-art captioning models which is not desirable by humans. To decrease the object hallucination in captioning, we propose three simple yet efficient training augmentation method for sentences which requires no new training data or increase
in the model size. By extensive analysis, we show that the proposed methods can significantly diminish our models’ object bias on hallucination metrics. Moreover, we experimentally demonstrate that our methods decrease the dependency on the visual features. All of our code, configuration files and model weights are available online.