Automatic Synthetic Document Image Generation using Generative Adversarial Networks: Application in Mobile-Captured Document Analysis

In this paper, we propose a method using Generative Adversarial Networks for automatically synthesizing document images that are similar to real printed documents captured by mobile phone's camera in unconstrained environment. We focus on the simulation of image defects for unconstrained mobile image acquisition procedure (non-uniform illumination, defocusing, optical and mechanical deformations, vibrations, noise in electronic components,...). Our approach is proven to be low-cost as it only requires a collection of real document images without any annotation. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach to improve OCR (Optical Character Recognition) recognition rate in a mobile-captured document images framework. Although in this paper, we focus on modern printed document images, our proposed approach could be extended to another type of documents, including historical one.