Identifying and understanding tabular material in compound documents

Tables are important components of technical documents. This paper addresses the following problems: (i) identifying a tabular component in a scanned image of a compound document containing text, drawings, diagrams, etc.; (ii) understanding the content of the table in order to convert the table into electronic format. As far as the authors are aware, the problems addressed are new. An algorithm for performing both the above tasks has been studied and implemented. Preliminary experimental results indicate satisfactory performance for many table lay-out styles.<<ETX>>