High accuracy and language independent document retrieval with a Fast Invariant Transform

This paper presents a tool and a novel fast invariant transform (FIT) algorithm for language independent e-documents access. The tool enables a person to access an e-document through an informal camera capture of a document hardcopy. It can save people from remembering/exploring numerous directories and file names, or even going through many pages/paragraphs in one document. It can also facilitate people´s manipulation of a document or people´s interactions through documents. Additionally, the algorithm is useful for binding multimedia data to language independent paper documents. Our document recognition algorithm is inspired by the widely known SIFT descriptor but can be computed much more efficiently for both descriptor construction and search. It also uses much less storage space than the SIFT approach. By testing our algorithm with randomly scaled and rotated document pages, we can achieve a 99.73% page recognition rate on the 2188-page ICME06 proceedings and 99.9% page recognition rate on a 504-page Japanese math book.