CISOL: An Open and Extensible Dataset for Table Structure Recognition in the Construction Industry

David Tschirschwitz, Volker Rodehorst; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 7594-7602

Reproducibility and replicability are critical pillars of empirical research particularly in machine learning where they depend not only on the availability of models but also on the datasets used to train and evaluate those models. In this paper we introduce the Construction Industry Steel Ordering List (CISOL) dataset which was developed with a focus on transparency to ensure reproducibility replicability and extensibility. CISOL provides a valuable new research resource and highlights the importance of having diverse datasets even in niche application domains such as table extraction in civil engineering. CISOL is unique in that it contains real-world civil engineering documents from industry making it a distinctive contribution to the field. The dataset contains more than 120000 annotated instances in over 800 document images positioning it as a medium-sized dataset that provides a robust foundation for Table Structure Recognition (TSR) and Table Detection (TD) tasks. Benchmarking results show that CISOL achieves 67.22 mAP@0.5:0.95:0.05 using the YOLOv8 model outperforming the TSR-specific TATR model. This highlights the effectiveness of CISOL as a benchmark for advancing TSR especially in specialized domains.