Hybrid Page Segmentation with Efficient Whitespace Rectangles Extraction and Grouping

Page segmentation is still a challenging problem due to the large variety of document layouts. Methods examining both foreground and background regions are among the most effective to solve this problem. However, their performance is influenced by the implementation of two key steps: the extraction and selection of background regions, and the grouping of background regions into separators. This paper proposes an efficient hybrid method for page segmentation. The method extracts white space rectangles based on connected component analysis, and filters white space rectangles progressively incorporating foreground and background information such that the remaining rectangles are likely to form column separators. Experimental results on the ICDAR2009 page segmentation competition test set demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.