Ana Costa e Silva mailed me to let me know of the upcoming table understanding competition at this year's ICDAR conference. The details are here. From the website:
Motivation: Tables are a prominent element of communication in documents, often containing information that would take many a paragraph to write otherwise. The first step to table understanding is to draw the tables physical model, i.e. identify its location and component cells, rows ad columns. Several authors have dedicated themselves to these tasks, using diverse methods, however it is difficult to know which methods work best under which circumstance because of the diverse testing conditions used by each. This competition aims at addressing this lacuna in our field.
Tasks: This competition will involve two independent sub-competitions. Authors may choose to compete for one task or the other or both.
- Table location sub-competition: This task consists of identifying which lines in the document belong to one same table area or not;
- Table segmentation sub-competition: This task consists of identifying which column the cells of each table belong to, i.e. identifying which cells belong to one same column. Each cell should be attributed a start and end column index (which will be different from each other for spanning cells). Identifying row spanning cells is not relevant for this competition.
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