A Ground-Truthing Tool for Layout Analysis Performance Evaluation

There is a significant need for performance evaluation of Layout Analysis methods. The greatest stumbling block is the lack of sufficient ground truth. In particular, there is currently no ground-truth for the evaluation of the performance of page segmentation methods dealing with complex-shaped regions and documents with non-uniformly oriented regions.This paper describes a new, flexible, ground-truthing tool. It is fast and easy to use as it performs page segmentation to obtain a first description of regions. The ground-truthing system allows for the editing (merging, splitting and shape alteration) of each of the region outlines obtained from page segmentation. The resulting ground-truth regions are described in terms of isothetic polygons to ensure flexibility and wide applicability. The system also provides for the labelling of each of the ground truth regions according to the type of their content and their logical function. The former can be used to evaluate page classification, while the latter can be used in assessing logical layout structure extraction.

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