Capturing Abstract Matrices from Paper

Capturing and understanding mathematics from print form is an important task in translating written mathematical knowledge into electronic form. While the problem of syntactically recognising mathematical formulas from scanned images has received attention, very little work has been done on semantic validation and correction of recognised formulas. We present a first step towards such an integrated system by combining the Infty system with a semantic analyser for matrix expressions. We applied the combined system in experiments on the semantic analysis of matrix images scanned from textbooks. While the first results are encouraging, they also demonstrate many ambiguities one has to deal with when analysing matrix expressions in different contexts. We give a detailed overview of the problems we encountered that motivate further research into semantic validation of mathematical formula recognition.