Document representation and its application to page decomposition

Transforming a paper document to its electronic version in a form suitable for efficient storage, retrieval, and interpretation continues to be a challenging problem. An efficient representation scheme for document images is necessary to solve this problem. Document representation involves techniques of thresholding, skew detection, geometric layout analysis, and logical layout analysis. The derived representation can then be used in document storage and retrieval. Page segmentation is an important stage in representing document images obtained by scanning journal pages. The performance of a document understanding system greatly depends on the correctness of page segmentation and labeling of different regions such as text, tables, images, drawings, and rulers. We use the traditional bottom-up approach based on the connected component extraction to efficiently implement page segmentation and region identification. A new document model which preserves top-down generation information is proposed based on which a document is logically represented for interactive editing, storage, retrieval, transfer, and logical analysis. Our algorithm has a high accuracy and takes approximately 1.4 seconds on a SGI Indy workstation for model creation, including orientation estimation, segmentation, and labeling (text, table, image, drawing, and ruler) for a 2550/spl times/3300 image of a typical journal page scanned at 300 dpi. This method is applicable to documents from various technical journals and can accommodate moderate amounts of skew and noise.