A document understanding method for database construction of an electronic library

A new method is presented for analyzing document images and constructing a database from them. This method is implemented in an electronic library system named CyberMagazine, where document images are sequentially converted into database tuples by block segmentation, rough classification, and syntactic analysis. CyberMagazine's image understanding method combines the use of decision tree classification and syntactic analysis using a newly presented matrix grammar. In order to combine the classification and the syntactic analysis steps, the authors propose an augmentation technique for carrying out decision tree classification. Experimental results subsequently demonstrate that high understanding accuracy is obtained by adequate augmentation.