Interactive approach to the extraction of logical structures from unformatted document images using a sub-structure model

Describes a new document analysis method for unformatted documents such as advertisements or catalogs. Conventional model-based approaches to the extraction of logical structures are hard to apply to advertisements or catalogs, because a model of a page can´t be defined. However, these kinds of documents have similar configurations of the regions that represent each product, where a local model of a local layout and logical structures can be defined. This model, which we call a sub-structure model, can be used as a template to extract the logical structures from other regions that represent the same kinds of products. In proposed system, a sub-structure model is captured through an interactive process with a user. The system was tested on advertisements in Japanese computer magazines and the experiments show promising results