Method and system for generating synthetic documents for layout recognition and information retrieval

Abstract

A solution to identify the layout elements in a document is provided. The documents are formulated in an integrated visual space, where they are treated uniformly as a rasterized image. The transformation to image space facilitates exploitation of a spectrum of stylistic cues, such as spacing between the lines and paragraphs. Effective recognition of layout elements is provided by applying a synthetic generator model that creates artificial documents with the required labels and bounding boxes. The generator model is based on a Bayesian Network, offers full flexibility in controlling the document types and labels, and can introduce artificial defects to synthesize low-quality documents. An artificial intelligence model for detecting layouts is trained based on these synthetic documents and the resultant model is used to identify the layout elements in real-world documents. The resulting layout elements, when augmented with the text content, greatly aids in effective information retrieval.