Document Structure and Layout Analysis

TL;DR: Automatic analysis of an arbitrary document with complex layout is an extremely difficult task and is beyond the capabilities of the state-of-the-art document structure and layout analysis systems.

Abstract: A document image is composed of a variety of physical entities or regions such as text blocks, lines, words, figures, tables, and background. We could also assign functional or logical labels such as sentences, titles, captions, author names, and addresses to some of these regions. The process of document structure and layout analysis tries to decompose a given document image into its component regions and understand their functional roles and relationships. The processing is carried out in multiple steps, such as preprocessing, page decomposition, structure understanding, etc. We will look into each of these steps in detail in the following sections. Document images are often generated from physical documents by digitization using scanners or digital cameras. Many documents, such as newspapers, magazines and brochures, contain very complex layout due to the placement of figures, titles, and captions, complex backgrounds, artistic text formatting, etc. (see Figure 1). A human reader uses a variety of additional cues such as context, conventions and information about language/script, along with a complex reasoning process to decipher the contents of a document. Automatic analysis of an arbitrary document with complex layout is an extremely difficult task and is beyond the capabilities of the state-of-the-art document structure and layout analysis systems. This is interesting since documents are designed to be effective and clear to human interpretation unlike natural images.