An Abstract Argumentation-based Strategy for Reading Order Detection.
Stefano Ferilli, Andrea Pazienza · CINECA IRIS Institutional Research Information System (University of Bari Aldo Moro) · 2015
Document Image Analysis is the branch of Document Processing in charge of extracting high-level information from the purely pictorial appearance of the document. In between single-column documents, in which no reading order ambiguity is present, and fully partitioned documents, in which each layout component is self-contained and hence can be read independently of all the others, there are tricky cases in which (some of) the layout components in a document page are related to each other, in that they contain different portions of a single discourse (e.g., newspapers). In these cases, automatic procedures for the acquisition of the document content might be ineffective, inapplicable, or lead to inconsistent results. This paper proposes an automatic strategy for identifying the correct reading order of a document page’s components based on abstract argumentation. The technique is unsupervised, and works on any kind of document based only on general assumptions about how humans behave when reading documents. Experimental results show that it is very effective, also compared to previous solutions that have been proposed in the literature.