Abstract: In this paper we present an automatic method for separating static and variable content from administrative document images. An alignment approach is able to unsupervisedly build probabilistic templates from a set of examples of the same document kind. Such templates define which is the likelihood of every pixel of being either static or variable content. In the extraction step, the same alignment technique is used to match
an incoming image with the template and to locate the positions where variable fields appear. We validate our approach on the public NIST Structured Tax Forms Dataset.