Major components of a complete text reading system

The document image processes used in a recently developed text reading system are described. The system consists of three major components: document analysis, document understanding, and character segmentation/recognition. The document analysis component extracts lines of text from a page for recognition. The document understanding component extracts logical relationships between the document constituents. The character segmentation/recognition component extracts characters from a text line and recognizes them. Experiments on more than a hundred documents have proved that the proposed approaches to document analysis and document understanding are robust even for multicolumned and multiarticle documents containing graphics and photographs, and that the proposed character segmentation/recognition method is robust enough to cope with omnifont characters which frequently touch each other. >