Table detection and cell segmentation in online handwritten documents with graph attention networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning approach for table detection and cell segmentation with densely connected graph attention networks in free form online documents. Each online document is regarded as a graph, where nodes represent strokes and edges represent the relationships between strokes. Then we propose a graph attention network model to classify nodes and edges simultaneously. According to node classification results, tables can be detected in each document. By combining node and edge classification resutls, cells in each table can be segmented. To improve information flow in the network and enable efficient reuse of features among layers, dense connectivity among layers is used. Our proposed model has been experimentally validated on an online handwritten document dataset IAMOnDo and achieved encouraging results.