Digital Libraries and Document Image Analysis Techniques: a Survey

Nowadays, Digital Libraries have become a widely used service to store and share both digital born documents and digital versions of works stored by traditional libraries. Document images are intrinsically non-structured and the structure and semantic of the digitized documents is in most part lost during the conversion. Several techniques related to the Document Image Analysis research area have been proposed in the past to deal with document image retrieval applications. In this chapter a survey about the more recent techniques applied in the field of recognition and retrieval of text and graphical documents is presented. In particular we describe techniques related to recognition-free approaches.