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Semantic information extraction from images of complex documents

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Abstract

Even though the digital processing of documents is increasingly widespread in industry, printed documents are still largely in use. In order to process electronically the contents of printed documents, information must be extracted from digital images of documents. When dealing with complex documents, in which the contents of different regions and fields can be highly heterogeneous with respect to layout, printing quality and the utilization of fonts and typing standards, the reconstruction of the contents of documents from digital images can be a difficult problem. In the present article we present an efficient solution for this problem, in which the semantic contents of fields in a complex document are extracted from a digital image.

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Notes

  1. In these equations, P.x and P.y stand for the horizontal and the vertical coordinates of pixel P, respectively.

  2. Tesseract is an efficient OCR engine originally developed at Hewlett-Packard between 1984 and 1994. In 1995 it was ranked as one of the top three OCR engines in the UNLV Accuracy Test. Tesseract was open-sourced in late 2005.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been partially supported by Opus Software. We thank the anonymous reviewers for the many comments and suggestions upon preliminary versions of this work, which have helped greatly improve the quality of the final version of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Opus Software Ltd, Rua Eugenio de Medeiros 242, Sao Paulo, Brazil

    Claudio Antonio Peanho & Henrique Stagni

  2. University of Sao Paulo, Rua do Matao 1010, Sao Paulo, Brazil

    Flavio Soares Correa da Silva

Authors
  1. Claudio Antonio Peanho
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  2. Henrique Stagni
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  3. Flavio Soares Correa da Silva
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Correspondence to Flavio Soares Correa da Silva.

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Peanho, C.A., Stagni, H. & da Silva, F.S.C. Semantic information extraction from images of complex documents. Appl Intell 37, 543–557 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-012-0348-x

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