Groundtruth Image Generation from Electronic Text (Demonstration)

The problem of generating synthetic data for the training and evaluating of document analysis systems has been widely addressed in recent years. With the increased interest in processing multilingual sources, there is a tremendous need to be able to rapidly generate data in new languages and scripts, without the need to develop specialized systems. We have developed an approach that uses language support of the MSWindows operating system combined with custom print drivers to render tiff images simultaneously with windows Enhanced Metafile directives. The Metafile information is parsed to generated zone, line, word, and character groundtruth including location, font information and content in any language supported by Windows. The processing is embedded in a collection of tools for data generation, groundtruthing, degradation and evaluation. The discussion here focuses on the Groundtruth Generator.