Automatic acquisition of layout knowledge for understanding business cards

Document knowledge plays a very important role in many document image understanding methods. In these methods, the document knowledge is utilized to classify/extract individual item data interpretatively from paper-based sheets as a kind of document model: these days, this knowledge is specified into the document image understanding system in advance. In this paper, we propose an experimental method to acquire the layout knowledge automatically from sample document images. In particular, we focus on the acquisition of the layout of business cards. Our idea is to generate the layout knowledge of business cards from a predefined logical structure, which is used as a kind of meta-knowledge to interpretatively generate the layout knowledge of given business cards