Layout analysis
Parsing the visual geometry of a page — where text blocks, images, and tables sit — to understand its structure.
Think of it like
Like looking at a newspaper and identifying which parts are the headline, body text, sidebar, and ads by their position and size.
Example
A model ingests a form image and carves it into regions: "header area," "field labels," "input boxes" — then extracts text intelligently from each zone.
How it actually works
Layout analysis typically outputs bounding boxes or masks for content regions. It's the bridge between raw pixels and structured data. Reading order matters for multi-column documents. Modern approaches use object detection or segmentation on document images.
For product teams
Makes document automation work at scale — the model understands *context* through spatial position, not just character recognition.
For engineers
Feed images to a segmentation or detection model; output is usually region coordinates with class labels (heading, paragraph, table, etc.).
Related
- Document understanding — Feeds into document understanding for semantic parsing.
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