Papers
arxiv:2509.16506

CommonForms: A Large, Diverse Dataset for Form Field Detection

Published on Sep 20
· Submitted by Joe Barrow on Sep 24
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Abstract

A web-scale dataset and models for form field detection are introduced, achieving high precision and supporting diverse languages and domains.

AI-generated summary

This paper introduces CommonForms, a web-scale dataset for form field detection. It casts the problem of form field detection as object detection: given an image of a page, predict the location and type (Text Input, Choice Button, Signature) of form fields. The dataset is constructed by filtering Common Crawl to find PDFs that have fillable elements. Starting with 8 million documents, the filtering process is used to arrive at a final dataset of roughly 55k documents that have over 450k pages. Analysis shows that the dataset contains a diverse mixture of languages and domains; one third of the pages are non-English, and among the 14 classified domains, no domain makes up more than 25% of the dataset. In addition, this paper presents a family of form field detectors, FFDNet-Small and FFDNet-Large, which attain a very high average precision on the CommonForms test set. Each model cost less than $500 to train. Ablation results show that high-resolution inputs are crucial for high-quality form field detection, and that the cleaning process improves data efficiency over using all PDFs that have fillable fields in Common Crawl. A qualitative analysis shows that they outperform a popular, commercially available PDF reader that can prepare forms. Unlike the most popular commercially available solutions, FFDNet can predict checkboxes in addition to text and signature fields. This is, to our knowledge, the first large scale dataset released for form field detection, as well as the first open source models. The dataset, models, and code will be released at https://github.com/jbarrow/commonforms

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CommonForms

CommonForms is a large dataset (almost 500k annotated images) for form field detection in documents. Solving this problem allows you to automatically make scans and documents fillable. We train and release a pair of form field detection models (FFDNet-S and FFDNet-L) on CommonForms.

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