BaDLAD: A Large Multi-Domain Bengali Document Layout Analysis Dataset

Md. Istiak Hossain Shihab, Md. Rakibul Hasan, Mahfuzur Rahman Emon, Syed Mobassir Hossen, Md. Nazmuddoha Ansary, Intesur Ahmed, Fazle Rabbi Rakib, Shahriar Elahi Dhruvo, Souhardya Saha Dip, Akib Hasan Pavel, Marsia Haque Meghla, Md. Rezwanul Haque, Sayma Sultana Chowdhury, Farig Sadeque, Tahsin Reasat, Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun, Asif Shahriyar Sushmit

Abstract: While strides have been made in deep learning based Bengali Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in the past decade, absence of large Document Layout Analysis (DLA) datasets has hindered the application of OCR in document transcription, e.g., transcribing historical documents and newspapers. Moreover, rule-based DLA systems that are currently being employed in practice are not robust to domain variations and out-of-distribution layouts. To this end, we present the first multi-domain large Bengali Document Layout Analysis Dataset: BaDLAD. This dataset contains 33, 695 human annotated document samples from six domains - i) books and magazines ii) public domain govt. documents iii) liberation war documents iv) new newspapers v) historical newspapers and vi) property deeds; with 710K polygon annotations for four unit types: text-box, paragraph, image, and table. Through preliminary experiments benchmarking the performance of existing state-of-the-art deep learning architectures for English DLA, we demonstrate the efficacy of our dataset in training deep learning based Bengali document digitization models.