Automatic detection of change in address blocks for reply forms processing

In this paper, an automatic method to detect the presence of on-line erasures/scribbles/corrections/over-writing in the address block of various types of subscription and utility payment forms is presented. The proposed approach employs bottom-up segmentation of the address block. Heuristic rules based on structural features are used to automate the detection process. The algorithm is applied on a large dataset of 5,780 real world document forms of 200 dots per inch resolution. The proposed algorithm performs well with an average processing time of 108 milliseconds per document with a detection accuracy of 98.96%

ICDAR2003 Page Segmentation Competition

There is a significant need to objectively evaluate layout analysis (page segmentation and region classification) methods. This paper describes the Page Segmentation Competition (modus operandi, dataset and evaluation criteria) held in the context of ICDAR2003 and presents the results of the evaluation of the candidate methods. The main objective of the competition was to evaluate such methods using scanned documents from commonly-occurring publications. The results indicate that although methods seem to be maturing, there is still a considerable need to develop robust methods that deal with everyday documents

Thick 2D Relations for Document Understanding

We use a propositional language of qualitative rectangle relations to detect the reading order from document images. To this end, we define the notion of a document encoding rule and we analyze possible formalisms to express document encoding rules such as LATEX and SGML. Document encoding rules expressed in the propositional language of rectangles are used to build a reading order detector for document images. In order to achieve robustness and avoid brittleness when applying the system to real life document images, the notion of a thick boundary interpretation for a qualitative relation is introduced. The framework is tested on a collection of heterogeneous document images showing recall rates up to 89%

Resources for Evaluation of Summarization Techniques

We report on two corpora to be used in the evaluation of component systems for the tasks of (1) linear segmentation of text and (2) summary-directed sentence extraction. We present characteristics of the corpora, methods used in the collection of user judgments, and an overview of the application of the corpora to evaluating the component system. Finally, we discuss the problems and issues with construction of the test set which apply broadly to the construction of evaluation resources for language technologies.Comment: LaTeX source, 5 pages, US Letter, uses lrec98.st

Network of the Day: Aggregating and Visualizing Entity Networks from Online Sources

This software demonstration paper presents a project on the interactive visualization of social media data. The data presentation fuses German Twitter data and a social relation network extracted from German online news. Such fusion allows for comparative analysis of the two types of media. Our system will additionally enable users to explore relationships between named entities, and to investigate events as they develop over time. Cooperative tagging of relationships is enabled through the active involvement of users. The system is available online for a broad user audience

Ground Truth for Layout Analysis Performance Evaluation

Over the past two decades a significant number of layout analysis (page segmentation and region classification) approaches have been proposed in the literature. Each approach has been devised for and/or evaluated using (usually small) application-specific datasets. While the need for objective performance evaluation of layout analysis algorithms is evident, there does not exist a suitable dataset with ground truth that reflects the realities of everyday documents (widely varying layouts, complex entities, colour, noise etc.). The most significant impediment is the creation of accurate and flexible (in representation) ground truth, a task that is costly and must be carefully designed. This paper discusses the issues related to the design, representation and creation of ground truth in the context of a realistic dataset developed by the authors. The effectiveness of the ground truth discussed in this paper has been successfully shown in its use for two international page segmentation competitions (ICDAR2003 and ICDAR2005)