DMOS: a generic document recognition method, application to an automatic generator of musical scores, mathematical formulae and table structures recognition systems

Genericity in structured document recognition is a difficult challenge. We therefore propose a new generic document recognition method, called DMOS (Description and MOdification of Segmentation), that is made up of a new grammatical formalism, called EPF (Enhanced Position Formalism) and an associated parser which is able to introduce context in segmentation. We implement this method to obtain a generator of document recognition systems. This generator can automatically produce new recognition systems. It is only necessary to describe the document with an EPF grammar, which is then simply compiled. In this way, we have developed various recognition systems: one on musical scores, one on mathematical formulae and one on recursive table structures. We have also defined a specific application to damaged military forms of the 19th Century. We have been able to test the generated system on 5,000 of these military forms. This has permitted us to validate the DMOS method on a real-world application