🔥 CommonForms: A Large, Diverse Dataset for Form Field Detection

💡 This paper introduces CommonForms, a large and diverse dataset for form field detection, which involves identifying the location and type of form fields such as text input, choice buttons, and signatures in images of pages. The dataset was constructed by filtering 8 million documents from Common Crawl to arrive at a final dataset of 55,000 documents with over 450,000 pages, containing a diverse mixture of languages and domains. The dataset is unique in that one third of the pages are non-English and no single domain makes up more than 25 percent of the dataset.

The paper also presents a family of form field detectors, FFDNet-Small and FFDNet-Large, which achieve high average precision on the CommonForms test set. The models were trained at a relatively low cost of less than 500 dollars. The results show that high-resolution inputs are crucial for high-quality form field detection and that the cleaning process improves data efficiency.

The paper makes several key contributions, including the release of the first large-scale dataset for form field detection and the first open-source models. The dataset, models, and code will be made available to the public. The qualitative analysis shows that the models outperform a popular commercially available PDF reader and can predict checkboxes in addition to text and signature fields, making this a significant advancement in the field of form field detection. Overall, the paper provides a valuable resource for researchers and developers working on form field detection and related tasks.

📅 Published on Sep 20, 2025

🔗 Links:
• GitHub: https://github.com/huggingface
• arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16506
• PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16506

🤖 Models citing this paper:
• https://huggingface.co/jbarrow/FFDNet-L
• https://huggingface.co/jbarrow/FFDNet-L-cpu
• https://huggingface.co/jbarrow/FFDNet-S

📊 Datasets citing this paper:
• https://huggingface.co/datasets/Voxel51/commonforms_val_subset
• https://huggingface.co/datasets/jbarrow/CommonForms
• https://huggingface.co/datasets/WEwoCram/CommonForms

🚀 Spaces citing this paper:
• https://huggingface.co/spaces/jbarrow/CommonForms
• https://huggingface.co/spaces/Voxel51/2025-ai-timeline
• https://huggingface.co/spaces/PSynx/widget-detector-demo

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📢 By: https://xn--r1a.website/PaperNexus

#FormFieldDetection #DocumentImageAnalysis #FormFieldRecognition #DatasetConstruction #DocumentUnderstanding