Document Layout Analysis

Document layout analysis studies how to detect and classify page regions, recover reading order and hierarchy, and connect elements such as captions, tables, and form fields. Common approaches include object detectors and vision transformers, OCR combined with geometric or graph-based rules, and end-to-end vision-language models; some systems also use semantic cues to handle complex layouts. The field supports reliable document search, extraction, accessibility, and question answering across settings from scientific PDFs to historical scans and camera-captured forms. A central challenge is generalizing across languages, domains, and distortions while evaluating structural correctness—not just text recognition or bounding-box accuracy.