Document Image Segmentation and Layout Analysis

Takashi SAITOH  Toshifumi YAMAAI  Michiyoshi TACHIKAWA  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E77-D   No.7   pp.778-784
Publication Date: 1994/07/25
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Issue on Document Analysis and Recognition)
Category: 
Keyword: 
document image segmentation,  layout analysis,  document image processing,  

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Summary: 
A system for segmentation of document image and ordering text areas is described, and applied to complex printed page layouts of both Japanese and English. There is no need to make any assumptions about the shape of blocks, hence the segmentation technique can handle not only skewed images without skew-correction but also documents where columns are not rectangular. In this technique, based on the bottom-up strategy, the connected components are extracted from the reduced image, and classiferd according to their local information. The connected components calssified as characters are then merged into lines, and the lines are merged into areas. Extracted text areas are classified as body, caption, header or footer. A tree graph of the layout of the body texts is made, and the texts ordered by preorder traversal on the graph. We introduce the concept of an influence range of each node, a procedure for handling titles, thus obtaining good results on various documents. The total system is fast and compact.