Polar-Doc: One-Stage Document Dewarping with Multi-Scope Constraints under Polar Representation

Document dewarping, aiming to eliminate geometric deformation in photographed documents to benefit text recognition, has made great progress in recent years but is still far from being solved. While Cartesian coordinates are typically leveraged by state-of-the-art approaches to learn a group of deformation control points, such representation is not efficient for dewarping model to learn the deformation information. In this work, we explore Polar coordinates representation for each point in document dewarping, namely Polar-Doc. In contrast to most current works adopting a two-stage pipeline typically, Polar representation enables a unified point regression framework for both segmentation and dewarping network in one single stage. Such unification makes the whole model more efficient to learn under an end-to-end optimization pipeline, and also obtains a compact representation. Furthermore, we propose a novel multi-scope Polar-Doc-IOU loss to constrain the relationship among control points as a grid-based regularization under the Polar representation. Visual comparisons and quantitative experiments on two benchmarks show that, with much fewer parameters than the other mainstream counterparts, our one-stage model with multi-scope constraints achieves new state-of-the-art performance on both pixel alignment metrics and OCR metrics. Source codes will be available at url*****.