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Nov 12

From Codicology to Code: A Comparative Study of Transformer and YOLO-based Detectors for Layout Analysis in Historical Documents

Robust Document Layout Analysis (DLA) is critical for the automated processing and understanding of historical documents with complex page organizations. This paper benchmarks five state-of-the-art object detection architectures on three annotated datasets representing a spectrum of codicological complexity: The e-NDP, a corpus of Parisian medieval registers (1326-1504); CATMuS, a diverse multiclass dataset derived from various medieval and modern sources (ca.12th-17th centuries) and HORAE, a corpus of decorated books of hours (ca.13th-16th centuries). We evaluate two Transformer-based models (Co-DETR, Grounding DINO) against three YOLO variants (AABB, OBB, and YOLO-World). Our findings reveal significant performance variations dependent on model architecture, data set characteristics, and bounding box representation. In the e-NDP dataset, Co-DETR achieves state-of-the-art results (0.752 mAP@.50:.95), closely followed by YOLOv11X-OBB (0.721). Conversely, on the more complex CATMuS and HORAE datasets, the CNN-based YOLOv11x-OBB significantly outperforms all other models (0.564 and 0.568, respectively). This study unequivocally demonstrates that using Oriented Bounding Boxes (OBB) is not a minor refinement but a fundamental requirement for accurately modeling the non-Cartesian nature of historical manuscripts. We conclude that a key trade-off exists between the global context awareness of Transformers, ideal for structured layouts, and the superior generalization of CNN-OBB models for visually diverse and complex documents.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 25

FLORA: Efficient Synthetic Data Generation for Object Detection in Low-Data Regimes via finetuning Flux LoRA

Recent advances in diffusion-based generative models have demonstrated significant potential in augmenting scarce datasets for object detection tasks. Nevertheless, most recent models rely on resource-intensive full fine-tuning of large-scale diffusion models, requiring enterprise-grade GPUs (e.g., NVIDIA V100) and thousands of synthetic images. To address these limitations, we propose Flux LoRA Augmentation (FLORA), a lightweight synthetic data generation pipeline. Our approach uses the Flux 1.1 Dev diffusion model, fine-tuned exclusively through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). This dramatically reduces computational requirements, enabling synthetic dataset generation with a consumer-grade GPU (e.g., NVIDIA RTX 4090). We empirically evaluate our approach on seven diverse object detection datasets. Our results demonstrate that training object detectors with just 500 synthetic images generated by our approach yields superior detection performance compared to models trained on 5000 synthetic images from the ODGEN baseline, achieving improvements of up to 21.3% in mAP@.50:.95. This work demonstrates that it is possible to surpass state-of-the-art performance with far greater efficiency, as FLORA achieves superior results using only 10% of the data and a fraction of the computational cost. This work demonstrates that a quality and efficiency-focused approach is more effective than brute-force generation, making advanced synthetic data creation more practical and accessible for real-world scenarios.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 29