A survey for table recognition based on deep learning

Abstract

Tables, as an important information interaction media containing much structured information, are popularly adopted in our life. There are a lot of table recognition methods for understanding and applying these information. Among them, table recognition based on deep learning is the mainstream. Therefore, we conducted this survey to summarize the latest research on table recognition based on deep learning in recent years. Table recognition can be divided into three sub-tasks, namely table detection, table structure recognition and table content recognition, so we firstly introduce the importance and significance of table recognition research and analyze the current challenges faced by each sub-task. Then, we list the existing public table recognition datasets and introduce commonly used evaluation metrics. Furthermore, we review deep learning-based solutions proposed in recent years for three different sub-tasks and reclassify them. Especially for table structure recognition, we reclassify them according to their annotation schemes. Finally, we report the performance of some excellent methods, such as CascadeTabNet, TSRFormer, SEM, etc, on public datasets, and describe the future research directions, including table recognition in natural scenes, question and answer about tables, visual information extraction, domain adaptation etc. In summary, this survey reviews the data, evaluations, methods, and development directions of table recognition. Table understanding and domain adaptation need as well to be focused on. The former can predict the relationships between two table elements, which helps us to understand the table. The latter can enhance the generalization ability of table recognition methods, thereby obtaining more robust recognition performance. Both are important development directions for table recognition in the future.