Axis-Aligned Document Dewarping

Abstract: Document dewarping is crucial for many applications. However, existing learning-based methods primarily rely on supervised regression with annotated data without leveraging the inherent geometric properties in physical documents to the dewarping process. Our key insight is that a well-dewarped document is characterized by transforming distorted feature lines into axis-aligned ones. This property aligns with the inherent axis-aligned nature of the discrete grid geometry in planar documents. In the training phase, we propose an axis-aligned geometric constraint to enhance document dewarping. In the inference phase, we propose an axis alignment preprocessing strategy to reduce the dewarping difficulty. In the evaluation phase, we introduce a new metric, Axis-Aligned Distortion (AAD), that not only incorporates geometric meaning and aligns with human visual perception but also demonstrates greater robustness. As a result, our method achieves SOTA results on multiple existing benchmarks and achieves 18.2%~34.5% improvements on the AAD metric.