Introduction of statistical information in a syntactic analyzer for document image recognition
André O. Maroneze, Bertrand Coüasnon, Aurélie Lemaître · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2010
This paper presents an improvement to a document layout analysis system, offering a possible solution to Sayre's paradox ("a letter must be recognized before it can be segmented; and it must be segmented before it can be recognized"). This improvement, based on stochastic parsing, allows integration of statistical information, obtained from recognizers, during syntactic layout analysis. We present how this fusion of numeric and symbolic information in a feedback loop can be applied to syntactic methods to simplify document description. To limit combinatorial explosion during exploration of solutions, we devised an operator that allows optional activation of the stochastic parsing mechanism. Our evaluation on 1250 handwritten business letters shows this method allows the improvement of global recognition scores.