Form identification based on cell structure

Abstract

This paper proposes a new form document identification technique that uses the structure of cells in a form. The proposed method represents the cell structure by the location of the center points of each cell. This representation allows the form identification to be realized by a process of matching the points in an input image to the points in registered forms. We have implemented the point matching process using the two-dimensional hash table. This implementation enables the system to robustly identify an input form even if it is skewed or deformed by a scanning process, and to reduce the time for the identification. Moreover, the similarity between two forms defined by the implementation can be used to evaluate the identification ability when a set of registered forms is specified. Experimental results show the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed technique.