Neural Document Unwarping using Coupled Grids

Restoring the original, flat appearance of a printed document from casual photographs of bent and wrinkled pages is a common everyday problem. In this paper we propose a novel method for grid-based single-image document unwarping. Our method performs geometric distortion correction via a deep fully convolutional neural network that learns to predict the 3D grid mesh of the document and the corresponding 2D unwarping grid in a multi-task fashion, implicitly encoding the coupling between the shape of a 3D object and its 2D image. We additionally create and publish our own dataset, called UVDoc, which combines pseudo-photorealistic document images with ground truth grid-based physical 3D and unwarping information, allowing unwarping models to train on data that is more realistic in appearance than the commonly used synthetic Doc3D dataset, whilst also being more physically accurate. Our dataset is labeled with all the information necessary to train our unwarping network, without having to engineer separate loss functions that can deal with the lack of ground-truth typically found in document in the wild datasets. We include a thorough evaluation that demonstrates that our dual-task unwarping network trained on a mix of synthetic and pseudo-photorealistic images achieves state-of-the-art performance on the DocUNet benchmark dataset. Our code, results and UVDoc dataset will be made publicly available upon publication.