FFD: Figure and Formula Detection from Document Images

Abstract

In this work, we present a novel and generic approach, Figure and Formula Detector (FFD) to detect the formulas and figures from document images. Our proposed method employs traditional computer vision approaches in addition to deep models. We transform input images by applying connected component analysis (CC), distance transform, and colour transform, which are stacked together to generate an input image for the network. The best results produced by FFD for figure and formula detection are with F1-score of 0.906 and 0.905, respectively. We also propose a new dataset for figures and formulas detection to aid future research in this direction. The obtained results advocate that enhancing the input representation can simplify the subsequent optimization problem resulting in significant gains over their conventional counterparts.