  In this paper, we introduce a fully convolutional network for the document
layout analysis task. While state-of-the-art methods are using models
pre-trained on natural scene images, our method Doc-UFCN relies on a U-shaped
model trained from scratch for detecting objects from historical documents. We
consider the line segmentation task and more generally the layout analysis
problem as a pixel-wise classification task then our model outputs a
pixel-labeling of the input images. We show that Doc-UFCN outperforms
state-of-the-art methods on various datasets and also demonstrate that the
pre-trained parts on natural scene images are not required to reach good
results. In addition, we show that pre-training on multiple document datasets
can improve the performances. We evaluate the models using various metrics to
have a fair and complete comparison between the methods.
