Document structure analysis and performance evaluation

Abstract

Document Structure Analysis and Performance Evaluation by Jisheng Liang Chair of Supervisory Committee Professor Robert M. Haralick Electrical Engineering The goal of the document structure analysis is to find an optimal solution to partition the set of glyphs on a given document to a hierarchical tree structure where entities within the hierarchy are associated with their physical properties and semantic labels. In this dissertation, we present a unified document structure extraction algorithm that is probability based, where the probabilities are estimated from an extensive training set of various kinds of measurements of distances between the terminal and non-terminal entities with which the algorithm works. The off-line probabilities estimated in the training then drive all decisions in the on-line segmentation module. An iterative, relaxation like method is used to find the partitioning solution that maximizes the joint probability. This approach can be uniformly apply to the cons...