A Deep Transfer Learning Approach to Document Image Quality Assessment

Document image quality assessment (DIQA) is an important process for various applications such as optical character recognition (OCR) and document restoration. In this paper we propose a no-reference DIQA model based on a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN), where the rich knowledge of natural scene image characterization of a previously-trained DCNN is exploited towards OCR accuracy oriented document image quality assessment. Following a two-stage deep transfer learning procedure, we fine-tune the knowledge base of the DCNN in the first phase and bring in a task-specific segment consisting of three fully connected (FC) layers in the second phase. Based on the fine-tuned knowledge base, the task-specific segment is trained from scratch to facilitate the application of the transferred knowledge on the new task of document quality assessment. Testing results on a benchmark dataset demonstrate that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance.