Image-based Table Cell Detection: a Novel Table Structure Decomposition Method with New Dataset

Abstract

Recently deep learning has been applied to decompose table structure with the main ideas of detecting table lines and then forming table cells. However, the existing methods face problems in dealing with tables with rotation or no internal table lines. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel table structure decomposition method, which directly detects table cells as objects and creates table structure. Extensions to the existing object detection models including effective table projection module are proposed to adapt to the table cell detection. To support the training of the enhanced models, we create a large image-based table dataset TableCell with cell level annotations. A novel and efficient semi-supervised method is proposed to annotate this new dataset. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed table structure decomposition method is simple, effective and robust to the tables without table lines or with rotation. Our dataset and code will be made available11https://github.com/weidafeng/TableCell.