# docExtractor: An off-the-shelf historical document element extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.08191 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08191/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Dec 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Page Layout Analysis System for Unconstrained Historic Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11838/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Historical Document Image Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08504/) (2022)
- [Transformer-Based Approach for Joint Handwriting and Named Entity Recognition in Historical documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04189/) (2021)
- [Unified Line and Paragraph Detection by Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09638/) (2022)
- [Large Scale Genealogical Information Extraction From Handwritten Quebec Parish Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14044/) (2023)
- [General Detection-based Text Line Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17095/) (2024)
- [The Learnable Typewriter: A Generative Approach to Text Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01660/) (2023)
- [Insightful analysis of historical sources at scales beyond human capabilities using unsupervised Machine Learning and XAI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09091/) (2023)
- [Normalized vs Diplomatic Annotation: A Case Study of Automatic Information Extraction from Handwritten Uruguayan Birth Certificates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08636/) (2025)
- [Image Collation: Matching illustrations in manuscripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08109/) (2021)
- [Palmira: A Deep Deformable Network for Instance Segmentation of Dense and Uneven Layouts in Handwritten Manuscripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09436/) (2021)
- [Historical Astronomical Diagrams Decomposition in Geometric Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08721/) (2024)
- [Is Medieval Distant Viewing Possible? : Extending and Enriching Annotation of Legacy Image Collections using Visual Analytics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09657/) (2022)
- [Prompt me a Dataset: An investigation of text-image prompting for historical image dataset creation using foundation models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01674/) (2023)
- [AnnoPage Dataset: Dataset of Non-Textual Elements in Documents with Fine-Grained Categorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22526/) (2025)
- [Studying Illustrations in Manuscripts: An Efficient Deep-Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05269/) (2025)
- [EpiSAM: Character Segmentation in Challenging Stone Inscriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28859/) (2026)
- [Archival Faces: Detection of Faces in Digitized Historical Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00558/) (2025)
- [Text region detection in historical astronomical diagrams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15886/) (2026)
- [A Visual Classification Dataset and Model Evaluation for Historical Manuscript Illustrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33449/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present docExtractor, a generic approach for extracting visual elements such as text lines or illustrations from historical documents without requiring any real data annotation. We demonstrate it provides high-quality performances as an off-the-shelf system across a wide variety of datasets and leads to results on par with state-of-the-art when fine-tuned. We argue that the performance obtained without fine-tuning on a specific dataset is critical for applications, in particular in digital humanities, and that the line-level page segmentation we address is the most relevant for a general purpose element extraction engine. We rely on a fast generator of rich synthetic documents and design a fully convolutional network, which we show to generalize better than a detection-based approach. Furthermore, we introduce a new public dataset dubbed IlluHisDoc dedicated to the fine evaluation of illustration segmentation in historical documents.