Document Layout Analysis is a fundamental step in Handwritten Text Processing systems, from the extraction of the text lines to the type of zone it belongs to. We present a system based on artificial neural networks which is able to determine not only the baselines of text lines present in the document, but also performs geometric and logic layout analysis of the document. Experiments in three different datasets demonstrate the potential of the method and show competitive results with respect to state-of-the-art methods.
Document structure analysis can be regarded as a syntactic analysis problem. The order and containment relations among the physical or logical components of a document page can be described by an ordered tree structure and can be modeled by a tree grammar which describes the page at the component level in terms of regions or blocks. This paper provides a detailed survey of past work on document structure analysis algorithms and summarize the limitations of past approaches. In particular, we survey past work on document physical layout representations and algorithms, document logical structure representations and algorithms, and performance evaluation of document structure analysis algorithms. In the last section, we summarize this work and point out its limitations. A document image is composed of a variety of physical entities or regions such as text blocks, lines, words, figures, tables, and background. We could also assign functional or logical labels such as sentences, titles, captions, author names, and addresses to some of these regions. The process of document structure and layout analysis tries to decompose a given document image into its component regions and understand their functional roles and relationships. The processing is carried out in multiple steps, such as preprocessing, page decomposition, structure understanding, etc. We will look into each of these steps in detail in the following sections. Document images are often generated from physical documents by digitization using scanners or digital cameras. Many documents, such as newspapers, magazines and brochures, contain very complex layout due to the placement of figures, titles, and captions, complex backgrounds, artistic text formatting, etc. (see Figure 1). A human reader uses a variety of additional cues such as context, conventions and information about language script, along with a complex reasoning process to decipher the contents of a document. Automatic analysis of an arbitrary document with complex layout is an extremely difficult task and is beyond the capabilities of the state-of-the-art document structure and layout analysis systems. This is interesting since documents are designed to be effective and clear to human interpretation unlike natural images.  The contributions to document image analysis of 99 papers published in the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) are clustered, summarized, interpolated, interpreted, and evaluated.