Proper names extraction from fax images combining textual and image features

In the frame of a unified messaging system, a crucial task of the system is to provide the user with key information on every message received, like keywords reflecting the object of the message, or the name of the sender. However, in the case of facsimiles, this information is not as easy to detect as in the case of e-mails, since no standard headers are defined. The aim of the presented work is to identify and extract specific information (the name of the sender) from a fax cover page. For this purpose, methods based on image document analysis (OCR recognition, physical blocks selection), and text analysis methods (optimized dictionary lookup, local grammar rules), are implemented to work in parallel. The fusion of their results brings a more accurate guess than any of the methods would achieve separately.