The significance of reading order in document recognition and its evaluation

Clausner, C; Pletschacher, S; Antonacopoulos, A

Abstract

Reading order detection and representation is an important task in many digitisation scenarios involving the preservation of the logical structure of a document. The corresponding need for the evaluation of reading order results generated by layout analysis methods poses a particular challenge due to the potential deviations between the ground truth and actually detected segmentation of the page. To this end a novel evaluation approach that responds to this problem by incorporating region correspondence analysis is proposed. Furthermore, a sophisticated reading order representation scheme is presented and used by the system allowing the grouping of objects with ordered and/or unordered relations. This is a typical requirement for documents with complex layouts such as magazines and newspapers. The evaluation method has been validated using the results of two state-of-the-art OCR / layout analysis systems and a basic top-to-bottom reading order detection algorithm applied on representative samples from the PRImA contemporary and the IMPACT historical document datasets.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition
• Start Date: Aug 25, 2013
• End Date: Aug 28, 2013
• Online Publication Date: Oct 15, 2013
• Publication Date: Aug 1, 2013
• Deposit Date: Sep 23, 2013
• Book Title: Proceedings of the 2013 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition
• ISBN: 9780769549996
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDAR.2013.141
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDAR.2013.141
• Related Public URLs: http://www.primaresearch.org/papers/ICDAR2013_Clausner_ReadingOrder.pdf; http://www.computer.org/portal/web/guest/home