OCR-Free Document Understanding Transformer

Geewook Kim, Teakgyu Hong, Moonbin Yim, Jeong Yeon Nam, Jinyoung Park, Jinyeong Yim, Wonseok Hwang, Sangdoo Yun, Dongyoon Han, Seunghyun Park

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

120 Scopus citations

Abstract

Understanding document images (e.g., invoices) is a core but challenging task since it requires complex functions such as reading text and a holistic understanding of the document. Current Visual Document Understanding (VDU) methods outsource the task of reading text to off-the-shelf Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engines and focus on the understanding task with the OCR outputs. Although such OCR-based approaches have shown promising performance, they suffer from 1) high computational costs for using OCR; 2) inflexibility of OCR models on languages or types of documents; 3) OCR error propagation to the subsequent process. To address these issues, in this paper, we introduce a novel OCR-free VDU model named Donut, which stands for Document understanding transformer. As the first step in OCR-free VDU research, we propose a simple architecture (i.e., Transformer) with a pre-training objective (i.e., cross-entropy loss). Donut is conceptually simple yet effective. Through extensive experiments and analyses, we show a simple OCR-free VDU model, Donut, achieves state-of-the-art performances on various VDU tasks in terms of both speed and accuracy. In addition, we offer a synthetic data generator that helps the model pre-training to be flexible in various languages and domains. The code, trained model, and synthetic data are available at https://github.com/clovaai/donut.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationComputer Vision – ECCV 2022 - 17th European Conference, Proceedings
EditorsShai Avidan, Gabriel Brostow, Moustapha Cissé, Giovanni Maria Farinella, Tal Hassner
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages498-517
Number of pages20
ISBN (Print)9783031198144
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Event17th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2022 - Tel Aviv, Israel
Duration: 23 Oct 202227 Oct 2022

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume13688 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference17th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2022
Country/TerritoryIsrael
CityTel Aviv
Period23/10/2227/10/22

Keywords

  • Document information extraction
  • End-to-end transformer
  • Optical character recognition
  • Visual document understanding

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'OCR-Free Document Understanding Transformer'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this