The massive amounts of digitized historical documents acquired over the last decades naturally lend themselves to automatic processing and exploration. Research work seeking to automatically process facsimiles and extract information thereby are multiplying with, as a first essential step, document layout analysis. If the identification and categorization of segments of interest in document images have seen significant progress over the last years thanks to deep learning techniques, many challenges remain with, among others, the use of finer-grained segmentation typologies and the consideration of complex, heterogeneous documents such as historical newspapers. Besides, most approaches consider visual features only, ignoring textual signal. In this context, we introduce a multimodal approach for the semantic segmentation of historical newspapers that combines visual and textual features. Based on a series of experiments on diachronic Swiss and Luxembourgish newspapers, we investigate, among others, the predictive power of visual and textual features and their capacity to generalize across time and sources. Results show consistent improvement of multimodal models in comparison to a strong visual baseline, as well as better robustness to high material variance.

本研究介绍了一种基于视觉和文本特征相结合的多模态方法，用于对历史报纸进行语义分割。该方法在 diachronic Swiss 和 Luxembourgish 报纸上进行了实验，结果显示多模态模型相较于强视觉基线模型进一步提升了高材料变异的鲁棒性和在不同时间和来源下的预测能力。

结合视觉与文本特征进行历史报纸语义分割