# DocBed: A Multi-Stage OCR Solution for Documents with Complex Layouts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.01414 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01414/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [PubLayNet: largest dataset ever for document layout analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07836/) (2019)
- [Chargrid: Towards Understanding 2D Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08799/) (2018)
- [dhSegment: A generic deep-learning approach for document segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10371/) (2018)
- [Combining Visual and Textual Features for Semantic Segmentation of Historical Newspapers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06144/) (2020)
- [Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Page Segmentation of Historical Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07695/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [DSG: An End-to-End Document Structure Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09118/) (2023)
- [LOCR: Location-Guided Transformer for Optical Character Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02127/) (2024)
- [AdaParse: An Adaptive Parallel PDF Parsing and Resource Scaling Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01435/) (2025)
- [Computer Vision Intelligence Test Modeling and Generation: A Case Study on Smart OCR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03536/) (2024)
- [Logios : An open source Greek Polytonic Optical Character Recognition system](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21474/) (2025)
- [Enhancement of Bengali OCR by Specialized Models and Advanced Techniques for Diverse Document Types](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05158/) (2024)
- [Layout-Aware Text Editing for Efficient Transformation of Academic PDFs to Markdown](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18115/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Digitization of newspapers is of interest for many reasons including preservation of history, accessibility and search ability, etc. While digitization of documents such as scientific articles and magazines is prevalent in literature, one of the main challenges for digitization of newspaper lies in its complex layout (e.g. articles spanning multiple columns, text interrupted by images) analysis, which is necessary to preserve human read-order. This work provides a major breakthrough in the digitization of newspapers on three fronts: first, releasing a dataset of 3000 fully-annotated, real-world newspaper images from 21 different U.S. states representing an extensive variety of complex layouts for document layout analysis; second, proposing layout segmentation as a precursor to existing optical character recognition (OCR) engines, where multiple state-of-the-art image segmentation models and several post-processing methods are explored for document layout segmentation; third, providing a thorough and structured evaluation protocol for isolated layout segmentation and end-to-end OCR.