Document Analysis System

This paper outlines the requirements and components for a proposed Document Analysis System, which assists a user in encoding printed documents for computer processing. Several critical functions have been investigated and the technical approaches are discussed. The first is the segmentation and classijication of digitized printed documents into regions of text and images. A nonlinear, run-length smoothing algorithm has been used for this purpose. By using the regular features of text lines, a linear adaptive classification scheme discriminates text regions from others. The second technique studied is an adaptive approach to the recognition of the hundreds of font styles and sizes that can occur on printed documents. A preclassifier is constructed during the input process and used to speed up a well-known pattern-matching method for clustering characters from an arbitrary print source into a small sample of prototypes. Experimental results are included.