Unified Line and Paragraph Detection by Graph Convolutional Networks

We formulate the task of detecting lines and paragraphs in a document into a unified two-level clustering problem. Given a set of text detection boxes that roughly correspond to words, a text line is a cluster of boxes and a paragraph is a cluster of lines. These clusters form a two-level tree that represents a major part of the layout of a document. We use a graph convolutional network to predict the relations between text detection boxes and then build both levels of clusters from these predictions. Experimentally, we demonstrate that the unified approach can be highly efficient while still achieving state-of-the-art quality for detecting paragraphs in public benchmarks and real-world images.