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, office 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 int..