This paper's core objective is to develop and validate a new neurocomputing model to classify document images in particularly demanding hard conditions such as image distortions, image size variance and scale, a huge number of classes, etc. Document classification is a special machine vision task in which document images are categorized according to their likelihood. Document classification is by itself an important topic for the digital office and it has several usages. Additionally, different methods for solving this problem have been presented in various studies; their respectively reached performance is however not yet good enough. This task is very tough and challenging. Thus, a novel, more accurate and precise model is needed. Although the related works do reach acceptable accuracy values for less hard conditions, they generally fully fail in the face of those above-mentioned hard, real-world conditions, including, amongst others, distortions such as noise, blur, low contrast, and shadows. In this paper, a novel deep CNN model is developed, validated and benchmarked with a selection of the most relevant recent document classification models. Additionally, the model's sensitivity was significantly improved by injecting different artifacts during the training process. In the benchmarking, it does clearly outperform all others by at least 4%, thus reaching more than 96% accuracy.
Keywords: deep convolutional neural network; document image processing; documents classification; hard conditions; real-world conditions.