Typeset mathematical expression analysis

Many mathematical expressions can be found in scientific papers, but no OCR system can recognize a scanned expression. A typeset mathematical expression analysis method, with the main idea to decompose an expression into a serial of sub-expressions and to determine the relations among these sub-expressions, is presented in this paper. The decomposition process, which is hierarchical and recursive, is illustrated by the decomposition tree. Eleven relations are defined, and the actual relationship among the sub-expressions is determined in 5 steps. In order to reduce the complexity of the original expression, mathematical glyphs are divided into 3 levels. Experimental results show that this method is good for analyzing a variety of complex expressions.