Feature string-based intelligent information retrieval from Tamil document images

Information Retrieval (IR) in document images has become a growing and challenging problem due to its rising popularity. This paper proposes a simple and effective method to extract the text and perform intelligent IR from Tamil Document Images without Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This methodology generates a feature string for every word image by extracting its features. This relies on their basic characteristics or shapes of letters instead of recognising the letters like OCR. The strength of this technique lies in extracting the text based on their basic features such as lines and black and white disposition rates in characters which is almost same for the characters across various font sizes and font faces. As an offline process, document images are preprocessed and text extraction process extracts the features from the word images based on their shapes and they are stored in temporary files. During online retrieval, textual keyword is obtained from the user and its primitive string is framed. Based on the primitive string, IR is performed and the resultant images are provided to the user. This technique could be easily adopted in large digital libraries for IR.

[1]  R. Seethalakshmi,et al.  Optical Character Recognition for printed Tamil text using Unicode , 2005 .

[2]  Francine Chen,et al.  Summarization of Imaged Documents without OCR , 1998, Comput. Vis. Image Underst..

[3]  Hong Zhao,et al.  Content-based indexing and retrieval method of Chinese document images , 1999, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition. ICDAR '99 (Cat. No.PR00318).

[4]  George Nagy,et al.  A Means for Achieving a High Degree of Compaction on Scan-Digitized Printed Text , 1974, IEEE Transactions on Computers.

[5]  Sargur N. Srihari,et al.  Use of document structure analysis to retrieve information from documents in digital libraries , 1997, Electronic Imaging.

[6]  Francine Chen,et al.  Spotting phrases in lines of imaged text , 1995, Electronic Imaging.

[7]  A. Lawrence Spitz.  An OCR based on character shape codes and lexical information , 1995, Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.

[8]  Gerard Salton,et al.  Automatic Text Processing: The Transformation, Analysis, and Retrieval of Information by Computer , 1989 .

[9]  Jeff L. DeCurtins,et al.  Keyword spotting via word shape recognition , 1995, Electronic Imaging.

[10]  Dan S. Bloomberg,et al.  Detecting and locating partially specified keywords in scanned images using hidden Markov models , 1993, Proceedings of 2nd International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR '93).

[11]  Andreas Myka,et al.  Measuring the effects of OCR errors on similarity linking , 1997, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.

[12]  Chew Lim Tan,et al.  Text Retrieval from Document Images Based on Word Shape Analysis , 2004, Applied Intelligence.

[13]  Sargur N. Srihari,et al.  A word shape analysis approach to lexicon based word recognition , 1992, Pattern Recognit. Lett..

[14]  W. B. Croft,et al.  An Evaluation of Information Retrieval Accuracy with Simulated OCR Output , 1993 .

[15]  Gaurav Harit,et al.  Ontology guided access to document images , 2005, Eighth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR'05).

[16]  Francine R. Chen,et al.  The use of emphasis to automatically summarize a spoken discourse , 1992, [Proceedings] ICASSP-92: 1992 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[17]  Yuan Yan Tang,et al.  Document Processing for Automatic Knowledge Acquisition , 1994, IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng..

[18]  Michael McGill,et al.  Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval , 1983 .

[19]  Yue Lu,et al.  An approach to word image matching based on weighted Hausdorff distance , 2001, Proceedings of Sixth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.

[20]  Francine Chen,et al.  Document image summarization without OCR , 1996, Proceedings of 3rd IEEE International Conference on Image Processing.

[21]  Gaurav Harit,et al.  An Integrated Scheme for Compression and Interactive Access to Document Images , 2007, 2007 International Conference on Computing: Theory and Applications (ICCTA'07).

[22]  Chew Lim Tan,et al.  Imaged Document Text Retrieval Without OCR , 2002, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[23]  L. D. Wilcox,et al.  A comparison of discrete and continuous hidden Markov models for phrase spotting in text images , 1995, Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.

[24]  Aparna Kokku,et al.  A Complete OCR System for Tamil Magazine Documents , 2009 .

[25]  K. H. Aparna,et al.  A Complete OCR System Development of Tamil Magazine Documents , 2003 .

[26]  Yue Lu,et al.  Retrieving imaged documents in digital libraries based on word image coding , 2004, First International Workshop on Document Image Analysis for Libraries, 2004. Proceedings..

[27]  C. V. Jawahar,et al.  Enabling Search over Large Collections of Telugu Document Images - An Automatic Annotation Based Approach , 2006, ICVGIP.

[28]  Donna Harman,et al.  The fourth text REtrieval conference , 1996 .

[29]  Eiichi Tanaka,et al.  High speed string edit methods using hierarchical files and hashing technique , 1988, [1988 Proceedings] 9th International Conference on Pattern Recognition.

[30]  R. Manmatha.  Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval Research at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval , 2005 .

[31]  Chew Lim Tan,et al.  Information Retrieval in Document Image Databases , 2004, IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng..

[32]  Chew Lim Tan,et al.  Image-based document vectors for text retrieval , 2000, Proceedings 15th International Conference on Pattern Recognition. ICPR-2000.

[33]  Yue Lu,et al.  Chinese Word Searching In Imaged Documents , 2004, Int. J. Pattern Recognit. Artif. Intell..

[34]  Dan S. Bloomberg,et al.  Word spotting in scanned images using hidden Markov models , 1993, 1993 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[35]  Yue Lu,et al.  Word spotting in Chinese document images without layout analysis , 2002, Object recognition supported by user interaction for service robots.

[36]  Shiyong Lu,et al.  Correct execution of transactions at different isolation levels , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

[37]  Ellen M. Voorhees,et al.  The Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-2001) (10th, Gaithersburg, Maryland, November 13-16, 2001). NIST Special Publication. , 2000 .