Online medical journal article layout analysis

We describe a physical and logical layout analysis algorithm, which is applied to segment and label online medical journal articles (regular HTML and PDF-Converted-HTML files). For these articles, the geometric layout of the Web page is the most important cue for physical layout analysis. The key to physical layout analysis is then to render the HTML file in a Web browser, so that the visual information in zones (composed of one or a set of HTML DOM nodes), especially their relative position, can be utilized. The recursive X-Y cut algorithm is adopted to construct a hierarchical zone tree structure. In logical layout analysis, both geometric and linguistic features are used. The HTML documents are modeled by a Hidden Markov Model with 16 states, and the Viterbi algorithm is then used to find the optimal label sequence, concluding the logical layout analysis.