Feature Engineering Meets Deep Learning: A Case Study on Table Detection in Documents

Abstract

Traditional computer vision approaches heavily relied on hand-crafted features for tasks such as visual object detection and recognition. The recent success of deep learning in automatically extracting representative and powerful features from images has brought a paradigm shift in this area. As a side effect, decades of research into hand-crafted features is considered outdated. In this paper, we present an approach for table detection in which we leverage a deep learning based table detection model with hand-crafted features from a classical table detection method. We demonstrate that by using a suitable encoding of hand-crafted features, the deep learning model is able to perform better at the detection task. Experiments on publicly available UNLV dataset show that the presented method achieves an accuracy comparable with the state-of-the-art deep learning methods without the need of extensive hyper-parameter tuning.