Pre-Printed and Hand-Filled Table-Form Analysis Aiming Cell Extraction

This paper presents an approach to extract the structure of pre-printed and hand-filled table-forms. The first module performs the cell identification based on Watershed transform. A second module detects the wrong cells produced by handwritten and/or pre-printed data. In this module, wrong cells and other cells are filtered by a compactness, perimeter and area analysis. In a third module, the wrong cells are merged with other cells to determine the exact structure. A miscellaneous database composed of 300 pre-printed and hand-filled table-form images was used to evaluate the efficiency of our methodology. Experiments showed significant and promising results.