---
license: apache-2.0
library_name: rfdetr
pipeline_tag: object-detection
language:
- bo
tags:
- tibetan
- document-layout-analysis
- rf-detr
- rfdetr
- object-detection
- bounding-box
- BDRC
datasets:
- BDRC/TDLA-Training-Dataset-v2
metrics:
- name: canonical mean AP50 (test)
  type: mAP
  value: 0.960
model-index:
- name: Tibetan-Modern-Book-Layout-Detection-RFDETR
  results:
  - task:
      type: object-detection
    dataset:
      name: TDLA-Training-Dataset-v2 (test)
      type: BDRC/TDLA-Training-Dataset-v2
    metrics:
    - type: mAP
      name: mAP@0.5 (native, test)
      value: 0.996
    - type: mAP
      name: mAP@0.5:0.95 (native, test)
      value: 0.813
---

# Tibetan Modern Book Layout Detection (RF-DETR-L)

An **RF-DETR-L** ([Roboflow](https://github.com/roboflow/rf-detr), DINOv2 backbone)
object detector that locates the four structural regions of a **modern Tibetan
book** page — **header**, **text-area**, **footnote**, **footer** — as a
preprocessing step for OCR and etext production.

- **Training code, recipes & write-up:** [buda-base/tibetan-book-layout-analysis](https://github.com/buda-base/tibetan-book-layout-analysis)
- **Dataset:** [BDRC/TDLA-Training-Dataset-v2](https://huggingface.co/datasets/BDRC/TDLA-Training-Dataset-v2) (gated, fair-use)

> This is one of several architectures BDRC fine-tuned on the same labels and
> recipe to test how much the choice of architecture matters (see the
> [blog post](https://github.com/buda-base/tibetan-book-layout-analysis/blob/main/BLOGPOST.md)).
> The primary, production release is the RT-DETR-l fine-tune at
> [BDRC/Tibetan-Modern-Book-Layout-Detection-RTDETR](https://huggingface.co/BDRC/Tibetan-Modern-Book-Layout-Detection-RTDETR).
> This RF-DETR-L checkpoint matches it almost exactly on every metric, and is
> published as a **permissively-licensed (Apache-2.0) alternative** for anyone
> who can't use the RT-DETR-l release's AGPL-derived training stack.

## Model description

This is an RF-DETR-L fine-tuned with the **`tam2col`** labelling scheme: text-area
boxes merged into one envelope per page, except on genuine two-column pages,
where it keeps one box per column. Header and footer are kept as separate
classes (they can be combined losslessly downstream).

| Property | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Architecture | RF-DETR-L (via [`rfdetr`](https://github.com/roboflow/rf-detr), DINOv2-small windowed backbone) |
| Task | Object detection |
| Base checkpoint | `rf-detr-large-2026.pth` (Roboflow, Apache-2.0) |
| Resolution | 1008 × 1008 |
| Number of classes | 4 (+ background) |
| Framework | `rfdetr` (`RFDETRLarge`) |
| Weights file | `rfdetr_tibetan_book_layout.pth` |

## Classes

Note: on the raw checkpoint, class id `0` is a reserved "none"/background
slot, so predicted class ids are shifted by one — see `infer.py`.

| Our class | Class name | Description |
| -- | --------- | --------------------- |
| 0 | header | running title / marginal text at top or side |
| 1 | text-area | main body text (one box per column) |
| 2 | footnote | notes below the text area |
| 3 | footer | folio numbers / marginal text at bottom or side |

## Recommended usage — per-class confidence thresholds

Like the primary RT-DETR-l release, this detector is recall-happy, so the best
operating point differs by class. These are each class's own max-F1 confidence
from a native per-class sweep on the test set:

| class | recommended conf |
| --- | --- |
| header (0) | **0.46** |
| text-area (1) | **0.32** |
| footnote (2) | **0.26** |
| footer (3) | **0.52** |

If you need a single global threshold, **0.30** is the best compromise (it is
also the operating point used for the cross-architecture comparison in the
blog post).

### Inference

```python
from rfdetr import RFDETRLarge

model = RFDETRLarge.from_checkpoint("rfdetr_tibetan_book_layout.pth")
CLASS_CONF = {0: 0.46, 1: 0.32, 2: 0.26, 3: 0.52}  # header, text-area, footnote, footer
names = {0: "header", 1: "text-area", 2: "footnote", 3: "footer"}

det = model.predict("page.jpg", threshold=min(CLASS_CONF.values()), shape=(1024, 1024))
for box, cls_id, score in zip(det.xyxy, det.class_id, det.confidence):
    cls = int(cls_id) - 1  # class 0 on the checkpoint is background
    if cls < 0 or cls > 3 or score < CLASS_CONF[cls]:
        continue
    print(names[cls], round(float(score), 3), box.tolist())
```

A ready-made CLI (`infer.py`) with the thresholds baked in is included in this
repo.

### Downloading the weights

```python
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
path = hf_hub_download("BDRC/Tibetan-Modern-Book-Layout-Detection-RFDETR",
                       "rfdetr_tibetan_book_layout.pth")
```

## Performance

Evaluated on the **held-out test split** (860 images) of
`BDRC/TDLA-Training-Dataset-v2`.

### Native 4-class metrics

| class | P | R | F1 | mAP@0.5 | mAP@0.5:0.95 |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| header | 0.977 | 0.960 | 0.968 | 0.986 | 0.757 |
| text-area | 0.986 | 0.994 | 0.990 | 0.996 | 0.982 |
| footnote | 0.913 | 0.933 | 0.923 | 0.973 | 0.816 |
| footer | 0.961 | 0.964 | 0.963 | 0.969 | 0.697 |
| **overall** | — | — | **0.961** | **0.981** | **0.813** |

The **mAP** columns are threshold-independent — they integrate over the full
precision/recall curve (every confidence), so they do not depend on any
operating threshold. The **P / R / F1** columns are reported at each class's
own **max-F1 confidence** (see the per-class thresholds above), *not* at a
fixed threshold.

### Canonical 3-class metrics

Header + footer are combined into one `header-footer` class (matched
individually), text-area is compared as one merged envelope, and footnote is
left as-is — a fair space in which every fine-tuned architecture in the blog
post was compared.

| class | best-F1 |
| --- | --- |
| header-footer | 0.963 |
| text-area | 0.994 |
| footnote | 0.923 |
| **mean F1** | **0.960** (@ conf 0.30) |

This matches BDRC's primary RT-DETR-l fine-tune (mean F1 0.960) almost exactly.

### Contamination (the metric that actually matters for OCR)

Of the ground-truth headers/footers and footnotes this model *misses*, the
share that get folded into its predicted text-area box (silently corrupting
downstream OCR) rather than dropped cleanly:

| region | detected | folded into text-area |
| --- | --- | --- |
| header/footer | 97% | 0.1% |
| footnote | 93% | 7% |

For comparison, off-the-shelf systems in the same evaluation ranged from 1.2%
to 56% on header/footer contamination alone — see the
[blog post](https://github.com/buda-base/tibetan-book-layout-analysis/blob/main/BLOGPOST.md)
for the full picture.

## Training details

| Parameter | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Base checkpoint | `rf-detr-large-2026.pth` (Roboflow, Apache-2.0) |
| Resolution | 1008 |
| Epochs | 100 planned, early-stopped ~epoch 59 (patience 20) |
| Batch size | 8 |
| GPU | single NVIDIA A10G (24 GB) |

- **Dataset:** [BDRC/TDLA-Training-Dataset-v2](https://huggingface.co/datasets/BDRC/TDLA-Training-Dataset-v2) — 8,325 images (6,751 train / 714 val / 860 test), volume-level leakage-free splits, augmented images confined to train.
- **Label variant (`tam2col`):** text-area boxes merged per page except on two-column pages; built with `data/build_curricula.py` in the GitHub repo.

## Intended use

Automatic layout detection of **modern Tibetan book** pages, as a
preprocessing step for OCR pipelines, document digitization, structured text
extraction, and digital-library indexing.

## Limitations

- Trained on **modern Tibetan books**; performance on traditional pecha,
  manuscripts, or woodblock prints is not characterized and may be poor.
- Optimized for 1008–1024 px input; very high-resolution scans may benefit
  from a higher inference resolution.
- The footnote class is rare in the source material (≈1.4% of boxes); recall
  is strong on the test set but the class remains the least-represented, and
  this checkpoint's footnote contamination (7%) is higher than BDRC's primary
  RT-DETR-l release (2%) despite a comparable footnote F1 — see the blog
  post's discussion of why F1 and contamination aren't interchangeable.
- Header/footer boxes are small and easy to over-predict — use the
  recommended per-class thresholds above.

## License

The model weights are released under the **Apache License 2.0**, matching the
license of the RF-DETR-L base checkpoint they were fine-tuned from. The **page
images used for training are not covered by any content license** — they are
BDRC library scans distributed on a fair-use basis. You are solely responsible
for your own copyright / rights analysis before use; BDRC accepts no liability
for misuse. See the
[dataset card](https://huggingface.co/datasets/BDRC/TDLA-Training-Dataset-v2)
for the full notice.

## Acknowledgements

Developed by the [Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC)](https://www.bdrc.io)
for the BDRC Etext Corpus, with annotations produced and consolidated on the
Ultralytics platform.

## Citation

```bibtex
@software{bdrc_tibetan_book_layout_rfdetr_2026,
  title   = {Tibetan Modern Book Layout Detection (RF-DETR-L)},
  author  = {Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC)},
  year    = {2026},
  url     = {https://huggingface.co/BDRC/Tibetan-Modern-Book-Layout-Detection-RFDETR}
}
```