Document Image Understanding

Overview

Document image understanding studies how to interpret scanned, photographed, and digital pages, from recognizing text to recovering layout, tables, diagrams, and meaning across pages. Common approaches include OCR paired with layout detection and reading-order models, specialized table or handwriting recognizers, and end-to-end vision-language models; retrieval-augmented systems use these outputs to answer questions with document evidence. Benchmarks test tasks such as text extraction, document question answering, table parsing, and multilingual or multi-page understanding. Models have improved on clean pages, but real-world degradation, rare scripts, complex layouts, and long-range evidence integration remain difficult, and strong text accuracy does not always translate into reliable downstream answers.

Latest papers

CardsList

148 papers12 papers in the last four weeks, down 14% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Ink Detection from Surface Topography of the Herculaneum Papyri

    Mar 29, 2026Giorgio Angelotti, Federica Nicolardi, Paul Henderson +1Historical Document AnalysisImage Segmentation

  2. Boosting Document Parsing Efficiency and Performance with Coarse-to-Fine Visual Processing

    Mar 25, 2026Cheng Cui, Ting Sun, Suyin Liang +15Document ParsingDocument Image Understanding

  3. TDATR: Improving End-to-End Table Recognition via Table Detail-Aware Learning and Cell-Level Visual Alignment

    Mar 24, 2026Chunxia Qin, Chenyu Liu, Pengcheng Xia +4Table Structure RecognitionDocument Image Understanding

  4. Multimodal OCR: Parse Anything from Documents

    Mar 13, 2026Handong Zheng, Yumeng Li, Kaile Zhang +22Document ParsingDocument Image Understanding

  5. ICDAR 2025 Competition on End-to-End Document Image Machine Translation Towards Complex Layouts

    Mar 10, 2026Yaping Zhang, Yupu Liang, Zhiyang Zhang +5Image Text TranslationMachine Translation

  6. Reading, Not Thinking: Understanding and Bridging the Modality Gap When Text Becomes Pixels in Multimodal LLMs

    Mar 10, 2026Kaiser Sun, Xiaochuang Yuan, Hongjun Liu +4Multimodal Large Language ModelsModality Gap in VLMs

  7. A Hybrid Vision Transformer Approach for Mathematical Expression Recognition

    Mar 9, 2026Anh Duy Le, Van Linh Pham, Vinh Loi Ly +3Handwritten Mathematical Expression RecognitionDocument Image Understanding

  8. Adaptive Radial Projection on Fourier Magnitude Spectrum for Document Image Skew Estimation

    Mar 6, 2026Luan Pham, Phu Hao Hoang, Xuan Toan Mai +1Document Image UnderstandingFrequency-Domain Image Processing

  9. Real5-OmniDocBench: A Full-Scale Physical Reconstruction Benchmark for Robust Document Parsing in the Wild

    Mar 4, 2026Changda Zhou, Ziyue Gao, Xueqing Wang +4VLM EvaluationDocument Parsing Benchmarks

  10. DISCO: Document Intelligence Suite for COmparative Evaluation

    Mar 4, 2026Kenza Benkirane, Dan Goldwater, Martin Asenov +1Document UnderstandingDocument Image Understanding

  11. FireRed-OCR Technical Report

    Mar 2, 2026Hao Wu, Haoran Lou, Xinyue Li +19Optical Character RecognitionDocument Parsing

  12. Towards Khmer Scene Document Layout Detection

    Feb 28, 2026Marry Kong, Rina Buoy, Sovisal Chenda +3Document Layout AnalysisDocument Image Understanding

  13. DiagramBank: A Quality-Audited Dataset of Scientific Schematic Diagrams with Multi-Level Document Context

    Feb 28, 2026Ling Yue, Tingwen Zhang, Jiaying Wang +2Document Image UnderstandingDocument Understanding

  14. AgenticOCR: Parsing Only What You Need for Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation

    Feb 27, 2026Zhengren Wang, Dongsheng Ma, Huaping Zhong +4Multimodal RAGVisual Document Retrieval

  15. Leveraging GenAI for Segmenting and Labeling Centuries-old Technical Documents

    Feb 24, 2026Carlos Monroy, Benjamin NavarroHistorical Document ProcessingDocument Image Understanding

  16. HSD: Training-Free Acceleration for Document Parsing Vision-Language Models with Hierarchical Speculative Decoding

    Feb 13, 2026Wenhui Liao, Hongliang Li, Pengyu Xie +15Efficient VLM InferenceSpeculative Decoding

  17. BookNet: Book Image Rectification via Cross-Page Attention Network

    Jan 29, 2026Shaokai Liu, Hao Feng, Bozhi Luan +3Document Image Understanding

  18. VDE Bench: Evaluating The Capability of Image Editing Models to Modify Visual Documents

    Jan 27, 2026Hongzhu Yi, Yujia Yang, Yuanxiang Wang +18Image Editing EvaluationImage Editing

  19. Counterfeit Answers: Adversarial Forgery against OCR-Free Document Visual Question Answering

    Dec 4, 2025Marco Pintore, Maura Pintor, Dimosthenis Karatzas +1Visual Question AnsweringVLM Robustness

  20. MedRepBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Medical Report Interpretation

    Aug 21, 2025Fangxin Shang, Yuan Xia, Dalu Yang +2VLM EvaluationHealthcare

  21. LEGATO: Large-scale End-to-end Generalizable Approach to Typeset OMR

    Jun 23, 2025Guang Yang, Victoria Ebert, Nazif Can Tamer +3Optical Music RecognitionDocument Image Understanding