DeepPatent2: A Large-Scale Benchmarking Corpus for Technical Drawing Understanding

Recent advances in computer vision (CV) and natural language processing have been driven by exploiting big data on practical applications. However, these research fields are still limited by the sheer volume, versatility, and diversity of the available datasets. CV tasks, such as image captioning, which has primarily been carried out on natural images, still struggle to produce accurate and meaningful captions on sketched images often included in scientific and technical documents. The advancement of other tasks such as 3D reconstruction from 2D images requires larger datasets with multiple viewpoints. We introduce DeepPatent2, a large-scale dataset, providing more than 2.7 million technical drawings with 132,890 object names and 22,394 viewpoints extracted from 14 years of US design patent documents. We demonstrate the usefulness of DeepPatent2 with conceptual captioning. We further provide the potential usefulness of our dataset to facilitate other research areas such as 3D image reconstruction and image retrieval.