Identification of Item Fields in Table-form Documents with/without Line Segments

Many methods to recognize the layout structures of table-form documents have been proposed until today. Most of them interpret table-form document images using the knowledge which is adaptable to the specification of layout structures of individual table-form documents. H.Naruse et al. proposed a successful method, based on neighboring/connective relationships among item fields in table-form documents, to recognize the layout structures of tableform document images. Our method is an advanced version of their method. In comparison with their method, our method further recognizes the layout structures of table-form document images whose item fields are not surrounded with real line segments. The main idea in our approach is to transform the original table-form document images so as to be adaptable to their method.