# TADoc: Robust Time-Aware Document Image Dewarping

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06988 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06988/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [DiT: Self-supervised Pre-training for Document Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02378/) (2022)
- [SEED: Semantics Enhanced Encoder-Decoder Framework for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10977/) (2020)
- [TextCtrl: Diffusion-based Scene Text Editing with Prior Guidance Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10133/) (2024)
- [DocTr: Document Image Transformer for Geometric Unwarping and Illumination Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12942/) (2021)
- [CDistNet: Perceiving Multi-Domain Character Distance for Robust Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11011/) (2021)
- [Multiview Rectification of Folded Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00166/) (2016)
- [Geometric Representation Learning for Document Image Rectification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08161/) (2022)
- [TPSNet: Reverse Thinking of Thin Plate Splines for Arbitrary Shape Scene Text Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12826/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Document Image Dewarping by Grid Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16850/) (2022)
- [Document Dewarping with Control Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10543/) (2022)
- [Can You Read Me Now? Content Aware Rectification using Angle Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02231/) (2020)
- [DocSegTr: An Instance-Level End-to-End Document Image Segmentation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11438/) (2022)
- [Visual Text Processing: A Comprehensive Review and Unified Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21682/) (2025)
- [Marior: Margin Removal and Iterative Content Rectification for Document Dewarping in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11515/) (2022)
- [UVDoc: Neural Grid-based Document Unwarping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02887/) (2023)
- [First Creating Backgrounds Then Rendering Texts: A New Paradigm for Visual Text Blending](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10168/) (2024)
- [IPAD: Iterative, Parallel, and Diffusion-based Network for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11923/) (2023)
- [Arbitrary Reading Order Scene Text Spotter with Local Semantics Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10159/) (2024)
- [Beyond Cropped Regions: New Benchmark and Corresponding Baseline for Chinese Scene Text Retrieval in Diverse Layouts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04999/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Flattening curved, wrinkled, and rotated document images captured by portable photographing devices, termed document image dewarping, has become an increasingly important task with the rise of digital economy and online working. Although many methods have been proposed recently, they often struggle to achieve satisfactory results when confronted with intricate document structures and higher degrees of deformation in real-world scenarios. Our main insight is that, unlike other document restoration tasks (e.g., deblurring), dewarping in real physical scenes is a progressive motion rather than a one-step transformation. Based on this, we have undertaken two key initiatives. Firstly, we reformulate this task, modeling it for the first time as a dynamic process that encompasses a series of intermediate states. Secondly, we design a lightweight framework called TADoc (Time-Aware Document Dewarping Network) to address the geometric distortion of document images. In addition, due to the inadequacy of OCR metrics for document images containing sparse text, the comprehensiveness of evaluation is insufficient. To address this shortcoming, we propose a new metric -- DLS (Document Layout Similarity) -- to evaluate the effectiveness of document dewarping in downstream tasks. Extensive experiments and in-depth evaluations have been conducted and the results indicate that our model possesses strong robustness, achieving superiority on several benchmarks with different document types and degrees of distortion.
