Object Detection in Invoices

Key field information extraction from documents is an increasingly covetable task. Previous related work has touched upon the subject through the lens of rule-based systems or through natural language processing methods. In this paper we see the task of information extraction from invoices as an object detection task. To this end, we used three different models YOLOv5, Scaled YOLOv4 and Faster R-CNN to detect key field information in invoices. Additionally, we propose a data preprocessing method that helps to better generalize the learning. All of the experiments were performed on a custom made dataset with a very high variety of invoice layouts. This decision comes in part from the lack of any suitable public dataset and from the need of finding the best procedure for annotating data pertaining to this task. The obtained results were encouraging, leading us to the conclusion that object detection is a viable method for information extraction.