Self-supervised deep reconstruction of mixed strip-shredded text documents

The reconstruction of shredded documents consists of coherently arranging fragments of paper (shreds) to recover the original document(s). A great challenge in computational reconstruction is to properly evaluate the compatibility between the shreds. While traditional pixel-based approaches are not robust to real shredding, more sophisticated solutions compromise significantly time performance. The solution presented in this work extends our previous deep learning method for single-page reconstruction to a more realistic/complex scenario: the reconstruction of several mixed shredded documents at once. In our approach, the compatibility evaluation is modeled as a two-class (valid or invalid) pattern recognition problem. The model is trained in a self-supervised manner on samples extracted from simulated-shredded documents, which obviates manual annotation. Experimental results on three datasets - including a new collection of 100 strip-shredded documents produced for this work - have shown that the proposed method outperforms the competing ones on complex scenarios, achieving accuracy superior to 90%. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.