Screen Parsing: Towards Reverse Engineering of UI Models from Screenshots

Abstract: Automated understanding of user interfaces (UIs) from their pixels can improve accessibility, enable task automation, and facilitate interface design without relying on developers to comprehensively provide metadata. A first step is to infer what UI elements exist on a screen, but current approaches are limited in how they infer how those elements are semantically grouped into structured interface definitions. In this paper, we motivate the problem of screen parsing, the task of predicting UI elements and their relationships from a screenshot. We describe our implementation of screen parsing and provide an effective training procedure that optimizes its performance. In an evaluation comparing the accuracy of the generated output, we find that our implementation significantly outperforms current systems (up to 23%). Finally, we show three example applications that are facilitated by screen parsing: (i) UI similarity search, (ii) accessibility enhancement, and (iii) code generation from UI screenshots.