Title: A new region-based segmentation method for complex document image analysis

Authors: Bing-Fei Wu, Yen-Lin Chen, Chung-Cheng Chiu

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Control Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, 1001 Ta Hsueh Road, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan. ' Department of Electrical and Control Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, 1001 Ta Hsueh Road, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan. ' Department of Electrical and Control Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, 1001 Ta Hsueh Road, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan

Abstract: In this paper, a new region-based segmentation method is proposed for resolving issues associated with the complexity of backgrounds of complex document images. The proposed method processes the document image regionally and adaptively according to local features using two stages. First, an automatic localised multilevel thresholding method is utilised to recursively segment a specified block region into several layered image sub-blocks. Then the multi-layer region-based clustering is performed to aggregate layered image sub-blocks with homogeneous features into associated object layers. Experiment results on text extraction from complex document images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Keywords: image segmentation; document analysis; localised histogram analysis; multilevel thresholding; region-based clustering; text extraction; image analyis; document images.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2005.008909

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2005 Vol.1 No.1, pp.34 - 44

Published online: 02 Feb 2006 *

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