An integrated approach to document decomposition and structural analysis

A document image is a visual representation of a paper document, such as a journal article page, a cover page of facsimile transmission, ooce correspondence, an application form, etc. Document image understanding as a research endeavor consists of developing processes for taking a document through various representations: from scanned image to semantic representation. This paper describes document decomposition and structural analysis, which constitutes one of the major processes involved in document image understanding. The current state-of-the-art and future directions in the areas of document segmentation, layout analysis, and logical block grouping are indicated. A system that performs decomposition and structural analysis (including logical grouping and read-order determination) on complex multi-articled documents is presented. This system uses bottom-up segmentation techniques to identify the block structure of a document, and layout rules to classify and group these blocks into logical units that represent meaningful subdivisions of the document. Experimental results showing the eeciency of this approach are presented and discussed.