Page grammars and page parsing. A syntactic approach to document layout recognition

Describes a syntactic approach to deducing the logical structure of printed documents from their physical layout. Page layout is described by a two-dimensional grammar, similar to a context-free string grammar, and a chart parser is used to parse segmented page images according to the grammar. This process is part of a system which reads scanned document images and produces computer-readable text in a logical mark-up format such as SGML. The system is briefly outlined, the grammar formalism and the parsing algorithm are described in detail, and some experimental results are reported