Document cleanup using page frame detection

When a page of a book is scanned or photocopied, textual noise (extraneous symbols from the neighboring page) and/or non-textual noise (black borders, speckles, ...) appear along the border of the document. Existing document analysis methods can handle non-textual noise reasonably well, whereas textual noise still presents a major issue for document analysis systems. Textual noise may result in undesired text in optical character recognition (OCR) output that needs to be removed afterwards. Existing document cleanup methods try to explicitly detect and remove marginal noise. This paper presents a new perspective for document image cleanup by detecting the page frame of the document. The goal of page frame detection is to find the actual page contents area, ignoring marginal noise along the page border. We use a geometric matching algorithm to find the optimal page frame of structured documents (journal articles, books, magazines) by exploiting their text alignment property. We evaluate the algorithm on the UW-III database. The results show that the error rates are below 4% each of the performance measures used. Further tests were run on a dataset of magazine pages and on a set of camera captured document images. To demonstrate the benefits of using page frame detection in practical applications, we choose OCR and layout-based document image retrieval as sample applications. Experiments using a commercial OCR system show that by removing characters outside the computed page frame, the OCR error rate is reduced from 4.3 to 1.7% on the UW-III dataset. The use of page frame detection in layout-based document image retrieval application decreases the retrieval error rates by 30%.     

Transforming paper documents into XML format with WISDOM++

The transformation of scanned paper documents to a form suitable for an Internet browser is a complex process that requires solutions to several problems. The application of an OCR to some parts of the document image is only one of the problems. In fact, the generation of documents in HTML format is easier when the layout structure of a page has been extracted by means of a document analysis process. The adoption of an XML format is even better, since it can facilitate the retrieval of documents in the Web. Nevertheless, an effective transformation of paper documents into this format requires further processing steps, namely document image classification and understanding. WISDOM++ is a document processing system that operates in five steps: document analysis, document classification, document understanding, text recognition with an OCR, and transformation into HTML/XML format. The innovative aspects described in the paper are: the preprocessing algorithm, the adaptive page segmentation, the acquisition of block classification rules using techniques from machine learning, the layout analysis based on general layout principles, and a method that uses document layout information for conversion to HTML/XML formats. A benchmarking of the system components implementing these innovative aspects is reported. Received June 15, 2000 / Revised November 7, 2000     

基于知识的多页文档逻辑结构的分析和理解

文档图像理解中最重要的部分是逻辑结构的提取。目前的研究主要集中在页面的布局分析上,少数对文档逻辑结构的研究只是针对单页文档或页面关系简单的多页文档。建筑标书的特殊性在于其层次式的逻辑组成结构没有明确的索引信息标识。本文提出了一种利用页面间引用关系获取文档逻辑结构的方法。该方法采用修正的树形结构表示文档的逻辑结构,逻辑树的创建过程就是逻辑结构的获取过程,而且有利于更高层的语义处理及还原输出。该方法已在标书自动处理系统中实现,保证了该系统的灵活和高效。     

Detection and analysis of table of contents based on content association

As a special type of table understanding, the detection and analysis of tables of contents (TOCs) play an important role in the digitization of multi-page documents. Most previous TOC analysis methods only concentrate on the TOC itself without taking into account the other pages in the same document. Besides, they often require manual coding or at least machine learning of document-specific models. This paper introduces a new method to detect and analyze TOCs based on content association. It fully leverages the text information throughout the whole multi-page document and can be directly applied to a wide range of documents without the need to build or learn the models for individual documents. In addition, the associations of general text and page numbers are combined to make the TOC analysis more accurate. Natural language processing and layout analysis are integrated to improve the TOC functional tagging. The applications of the proposed method in a large-scale digital library project are also discussed.     

The effect of border noise on the performance of projection-based page segmentation methods

Projection methods have been used in the analysis of bitonal document images for different tasks such as page segmentation and skew correction for more than two decades. However, these algorithms are sensitive to the presence of border noise in document images. Border noise can appear along the page border due to scanning or photocopying. Over the years, several page segmentation algorithms have been proposed in the literature. Some of these algorithms have come into widespread use due to their high accuracy and robustness with respect to border noise. This paper addresses two important questions in this context: 1) Can existing border noise removal algorithms clean up document images to a degree required by projection methods to achieve competitive performance? 2) Can projection methods reach the performance of other state-of-the-art page segmentation algorithms (e.g., Docstrum or Voronoi) for documents where border noise has successfully been removed? We perform extensive experiments on the University of Washington (UW-III) data set with six border noise removal methods. Our results show that although projection methods can achieve the accuracy of other state-of-the-art algorithms on the cleaned document images, existing border noise removal techniques cannot clean up documents captured under a variety of scanning conditions to the degree required to achieve that accuracy.     

Page segmentation of Chinese newspapers

This paper describes a new bottom-up method for page segmentation of Chinese document images. Because of some special characteristics of Chinese newspaper documents, many traditional methods developed for English documents fail in segmenting them correctly. Based on run-length smoothing algorithm and minimal spanning tree clustering, the proposed method can resolve the problems of segmenting Chinese documents that differ from English documents.     

Convex hull based skew estimation

Skew estimation and page segmentation are the two closely related processing stages for document image analysis. Skew estimation needs proper page segmentation, especially for document images with multiple skews that are common in scanned images from thick bound publications in 2-up style or postal envelopes with various printed labels. Even if only a single skew is concerned for a document image, the presence of minority regions of different skews or undefined skew such as noise may severely affect the estimation for the dominant skew. Page segmentation, on the other hand, may need to know the exact skew angle of a page in order to work properly. This paper presents a skew estimation method with built-in skew-independent segmentation functionality that is capable of handling document images with multiple regions of different skews. It is based on the convex hulls of the individual components (i.e. the smallest convex polygon that fully contains a component) and that of the component groups (i.e. the smallest convex polygon that fully contain all the components in a group) in a document image. The proposed method first extracts the convex hulls of the components, segments an image into groups of components according to both the spatial distances and size similarities among the convex hulls of the components. This process not only extracts the hints of the alignments of the text groups, but also separate noise or graphical components from that of the textual ones. To verify the proposed algorithms, the full sets of the real and the synthetic samples of the University of Washington English Document Image Database I (UW-I) are used. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons with some existing methods are also provided.     

A Conceptual Model and Rule-Based Query Language for HTML

Most documents available over the Web conform to the HTML specification. Such documents are hierarchically structured in nature. The existing data models for the Web either fail to capture the hierarchical structure within the documents or can only provide a very low level representation of such hierarchical structure. How to represent and query HTML documents at a higher level is an important issue. In this paper, we first propose a novel conceptual model for HTML. This conceptual model has only a few simple constructs but is able to represent the complex hierarchical structure within HTML documents at a level that is close to human conceptualization/visualization of the documents. We also describe how to convert HTML documents based on this conceptual model. Using the conceptual model and conversion method, one can capture the essence (i.e., semistructure) of HTML documents in a natural and simple way. Based on this conceptual model, we then present a rule–based language to query HTML documents over the Internet. This language provides a simple but very powerful way to query both intra–document structures and inter–document structures and allows the query results to be restructured. Being rule–based, it naturally supports negation and recursion and therefore is more expressive than SQL–based languages. A logical semantics is also provided.     

Bottom-Up Generation of Hypermedia Documents

Creating hypermedia documents for educational or informational purposes is a time and money consuming task. However, automation, especially for maintaining or adapting large hypermedia documents (e.g. a web site), is a must. This paper presents an approach for the bottom-up generation of hypermedia documents. The main idea is to start with a set of mediaobjects (text, images, video, etc.), select the most appropriate ones, sequence them to build a tree-like structure, integrate them into a set of screen pages, and finally convert each screen page into a single HTML file. Maintaining the resulting document is very easy because it only requires extending or modifying the pool of mediaobjects available and regenerating the document.     

基于XML的Web数据抽取研究

文中介绍了三种常用的Web数据抽取的方法:直接解析HTML文档的方法,基于XML的方法(也称作为分析HTML层次结构的方法)以及基于概念建模的方法。重点研究其中的基于XML的数据抽取方法,基本做法是将原始的HTML文档通过一个过滤器检查并修改HTML文档的语法结构,从而形成一篇基于XML的XHTML,然后利用XML工具来处理这些HTML文档。实现了从非结构化的HTML文档向结构化的XML文档转化的预处理过程,给在Web挖掘中使用传统的数据抽取方法进行数据抽取创造了有利条件。     

Table form document analysis based on the document structure grammar

Structure analysis of table form documents is an important issue because a printed document and even an electronic document do not provide logical structural information but merely geometrical layout and lexical information. To handle these documents automatically, logical structure information is necessary. In this paper, we first analyze the elements of the form documents from a communication point of view and retrieve the grammatical elements that appear in them. Then, we present a document structure grammar which governs the logical structure of the form documents. Finally, we propose a structure analysis system of the table form documents based on the grammar. By using grammar notation, we can easily modify and keep it consistent, as the rules are relatively simple. Another advantage of using grammar notation is that it can be used for generating documents only from logical structure. In our system, documents are assumed to be composed of a set of boxes and they are classified as seven box types. Then the box relations between the indication box and its associated entry box are analyzed based on the semantic and geometric knowledge defined in the document structure grammar. Experimental results have shown that the system successfully analyzed several kinds of table forms.     

一种基于位置信息的Web页面分割方法

提出并实现了一种针对HTML文档的页面分割方法,其目的是为了能有效提取新闻网页的正文以进行数据挖掘.基本思想是通过模拟网页浏览器的部分渲染工作,来还原HTML文档中每个标签在浏览器窗口上的显示位置,并以此对页面分割,用于提取一些重要区域的信息.在实验中,对10多个知名新闻站点如新浪、网易、TOM新闻等,利用这一方法提取其网页中的新闻正文,准确率在88.5%左右,表明了这一方法的有效性和可行性.     

Parameter-free geometric document layout analysis

Automatic transformation of paper documents into electronic documents requires geometric document layout analysis at the first stage. However, variations in character font sizes, text line spacing, and document layout structures have made it difficult to design a general-purpose document layout analysis algorithm for many years. The use of some parameters has therefore been unavoidable in previous methods. The authors propose a parameter-free method for segmenting the document images into maximal homogeneous regions and identifying them as texts, images, tables, and ruling lines. A pyramidal quadtree structure is constructed for multiscale analysis and a periodicity measure is suggested to find a periodical attribute of text regions for page segmentation. To obtain robust page segmentation results, a confirmation procedure using texture analysis is applied to only ambiguous regions. Based on the proposed periodicity measure, multiscale analysis, and confirmation procedure, we could develop a robust method for geometric document layout analysis independent of character font sizes, text line spacing, and document layout structures. The proposed method was experimented with the document database from the University of Washington and the MediaTeam Document Database. The results of these tests have shown that the proposed method provides more accurate results than previous ones     

Mobile Retriever: access to digital documents from their physical source

In this paper, we describe an image based document retrieval system which runs on camera enabled mobile devices. “Mobile Retriever” aims to seamlessly link physical and digital documents by allowing users to snap a picture of the text of a document and retrieve its electronic version from a database. Experiments show that for a database of 100,093 pages, the correct document can be retrieved in less than 4 s at a success rate over 95%. Our system extracts token pairs from the text, to efficiently index and retrieve candidate pages using only a small portion of the image. We use token triplets that define the orientation of three corresponding tokens to effectively prune the false positives and identify the correct page to retrieve. We stress the importance of geometrical relationship between feature points and show its effectiveness in our camera based image retrieval system.     

一种从HTML页面到RDF文档的转化方法

传统互联网页面是基于HTML语法结构的，这种结构适合于计算机上的显示．但页面所表达的含义需要用户在浏览的时候加以识别，这对于信息的检索和实现知识的共享是非常不便的。文章介绍了一种根据HMTL语法结构来实现HTML页面到RDF文档的转化方法，它可以将HTML文档从结构上转换为以XML语法为基础的RDF文档。     

Automatic accurate broken character restoration for patrimonial documents

In this article, we are interested in the restoration of character shapes in antique document images. This particular class of documents generally present a lot of involuntary historical information that have to be taken into account to get quality digital libraries. Actually, many document processing methods of all sorts have already been proposed to cope with degraded character images, but those techniques often consist in replacing the degraded shapes by a corresponding prototype which is not satisfying for lots of specialists. For that, we decided to develop our own method for accurate character restoration, basing our study on generic image processing tools (namely: Gabor filtering and the active contours model) completed with some specific automatically extracted structural information. The principle of our method is to make an active contour recover the lost information using an external energy term based on the use of an automatically built and selected reference character image. Results are presented for real case examples taken from printed and handwritten documents.     

Marginal noise removal of document images

Marginal noise is a common phenomenon in document analysis which results from the scanning of thick documents or skew documents. It usually appears in the front of a large and dark region around the margin of document images. Marginal noise might cover meaningful document objects, such as text, graphics and forms. The overlapping of marginal noise with meaningful objects makes it difficult to perform the task of segmentation and recognition of document objects. This paper proposes a novel approach to remove marginal noise. The proposed approach consists of two steps which are marginal noise detection and marginal noise deletion. Marginal noise detection will reduce an original document image into a smaller image, and then find marginal noise regions according to the shape length and location of the split blocks. After the detection of marginal noise regions, different removal methods are performed. A local thresholding method is proposed for the removal of marginal noise in gray-scale document images, whereas a region growing method is devised for binary document images. Experimenting with a wide variety of test samples reveals the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed approach in removing marginal noises.     

Enhancement of historical printed document images by combining Total Variation regularization and Non-local Means filtering

This paper proposes a novel method for document enhancement which combines two recent powerful noise-reduction steps. The first step is based on the Total Variation framework. It flattens background grey-levels and produces an intermediate image where background noise is considerably reduced. This image is used as a mask to produce an image with a cleaner background while keeping character details. The second step is applied to the cleaner image and consists of a filter based on Non-local Means: character edges are smoothed by searching for similar patch images in pixel neighborhoods. The document images to be enhanced are real historical printed documents from several periods which include several defects in their background and on character edges. These defects result from scanning, paper aging and bleed-through. The proposed method enhances document images by combining the Total Variation and the Non-local Means techniques in order to improve OCR recognition. The method is shown to be more powerful than when these techniques are used alone and than other enhancement methods.     

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 2550×3300 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     

基于知识模式的文档描述构建方法*

鉴于传统文档分析方法不能有效获取弱结构文档的知识描述,提出基于知识模式的文档描述构建方法。该方法综合考虑知识的行文模式与上下文结构特征,从而能够比传统方法更为有效地获取弱结构文档的知识描述。