  We present an exhaustive investigation of recent Deep Learning architectures,
algorithms, and strategies for the task of document image classification to
finally reduce the error by more than half. Existing approaches, such as the
DeepDocClassifier, apply standard Convolutional Network architectures with
transfer learning from the object recognition domain. The contribution of the
paper is threefold: First, it investigates recently introduced very deep neural
network architectures (GoogLeNet, VGG, ResNet) using transfer learning (from
real images). Second, it proposes transfer learning from a huge set of document
images, i.e. 400,000 documents. Third, it analyzes the impact of the amount of
training data (document images) and other parameters to the classification
abilities. We use two datasets, the Tobacco-3482 and the large-scale RVL-CDIP
dataset. We achieve an accuracy of 91.13% for the Tobacco-3482 dataset while
earlier approaches reach only 77.6%. Thus, a relative error reduction of more
than 60% is achieved. For the large dataset RVL-CDIP, an accuracy of 90.97% is
achieved, corresponding to a relative error reduction of 11.5%.
