Claudie Faure

Figures inserted in documents mediate a kind of information for which the visual modality is more appropriate than the text. A complete understanding of a figure often necessitates the reading of its caption or to establish a relationship with the main text using a numbered figure identifier which is replicated in the caption and in the main text. A figure and its caption are closely related; they constitute single multimodal components (FC-pair) that Document Image Analysis cannot extract with text and graphics segmentation. We propose a method to go further than the graphics and text segmentation in order to extract FC-pairs without performing a full labelling of the page components. Horizontal and vertical text lines are detected in the pages. The graphics are associated with selected text lines to initiate the detector of FC-pairs. Spatial and visual disorders are introduced to define a layout model in terms of properties. It enables to cope with most of the numerous spatial arrangements of graphics and text lines. The detector of FC-pairs performs operations in order to eliminate the layout disorder and assigns a quality value to each FC-pair. The processed documents were collected in medic@, the digital historical collection of the BIUM (Bibliothèque InterUniversitaire Médicale). A first set of 98 pages constitutes the design set. Then 298 pages were collected to evaluate the system. The performances are the result of a full process, from the binarisation of the digital images to the detection of FC-pairs.

A page of a document is a set of small components which are grouped by a human reader into higher level components, such as lines and text blocs. Document image analysis is aimed at detecting these components in document images. We propose the encoding of local information by considering the properties that determine perceptual grouping. Each connected component is labelled according to the location of its nearest neighbour connected component. These labelled components constitute the input of a rule-based incremental process. Vertical and horizontal text lines are detected without prior assumption on their direction. Touching characters belonging to different lines are detected early and discarded from the grouping process to avoid line merging. The tolerance for grouping components increases in the course of the process until the final decision. After each step of the grouping process, conflict resolution rules are activated. This work was motivated by the automatic detection of Figure&Caption pairs in the documents of the historical collection of the BIUM digital library (Bibliotheque InterUniversitaire Medicale). The images that were used in this study belong to this collection.