Building Non-Overlapping Polygons For Image Document Layout Analysis Results

Existing Computational Geometry algorithms aren't able to create a tight-fitting contour around document elements. Some of them don't follow the data points close enough, generating overlapping elements, while others, trying to keep close to the contour, break one element into pieces, falling between white spaces. The presented method both follows the contour closely and generates a single shape for a single element. The generation of the shape can be stopped at any time, either when there are no more intersections between layout elements or after a certain time elapsed, the result being valid at any given moment. In association with other algorithms it can offer a fast and clean solution for the problem of finding the non-overlapping areas resulted from the Layout Analysis document processing phase.