Self-Organizing Maps for Clustering in Document Image Analysis

In this chapter, we discuss the use of Self Organizing Maps (SOM) to deal with various tasks in Document Image Analysis. The SOM is a particular type of artificial neural network that computes, during the learning, an unsupervised clustering of the input data arranging the cluster centers in a lattice. After an overview of the previous applications of unsupervised learning in document image analysis, we present our recent work in the field. We describe the use of the SOM at three processing levels: the character clustering, the word clustering, and the layout clustering, with applications to word retrieval, document retrieval and page classification. In order to improve the clustering effectiveness, when dealing with small training sets, we propose an extension of the SOM training algorithm that considers the tangent distance so as to increase the SOM robustness with respect to small transformations of the patterns. Experiments on the use of this extended training algorithm are reported for both character and page layout clustering.