Treading Towards Privacy-Preserving Table Structure Recognition

We present TabGuard, a privacy-preserving framework for an end-to-end secure Table Structure Recognition. Tab-Guard masks all the contents of the table locally and utilizes the masked table image for structure recognition. Our method is simple yet effective for detecting table cells while preserving the inherent table alignment characteristics to reconstruct tables. Our approach benefits from inductive bias, expressed through an approximated table grid which helps alleviate challenges in the detection of cells that are small or have extreme aspect ratios. Experimental results demonstrate that our solution not only establishes a new state-of-the-art on several benchmark datasets but also effectively addresses long-standing challenges associated with dense tables having complex layouts. We make our code publically available at https://github.com/sachinraja13/TabGuard.