A methodology for evaluating algorithms for table understanding in PDF documents

This paper presents a methodology for the evaluation of table understanding algorithms for PDF documents. The evaluation takes into account three major tasks: table detection, table structure recognition and functional analysis. We provide a general and exible output model for each task along with corresponding evaluation metrics and methods. We also present a methodology for collecting and ground-truthing PDF documents based on consensusreaching principles and provide a publicly available groundtruthed dataset. Copyright © 2012 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM).