Computational Geometry for Document Analysis

Document analysis is concerned with the development of machines that can process visual information automatically. Computational geometry is concerned with the design of algorithms for solving geometric problems. Most problems in document analysis can be couched in geometric terms. In this paper we outline how computational geometry may significantly contribute to many aspects of the document analysis process and we provide pointers to a selection of the computational geometry literature where some of the most relevant results can be found. 1. Introduction Document analysis is concerned with the automatic transfer by machine of visual two dimensional documents most commonly consisting of printed pages from books, magazines or newspapers [PCHH93]. Maps and engineering drawings constitute another class of common documents. The first class of problems have much in common with optical character recognition (OCR) and hence computer vision. On the other hand document analysis is a special c..