The digitization of historical astrophysical literature with highly localized figures and figure captions

Abstract

Scientific articles published prior to the “age of digitization” in the late 1990s contain figures which are “trapped” within their scanned pages. While progress to extract figures and their captions has been made, there is currently no robust method for this process. We present a YOLO-based method for use on scanned pages, after they have been processed with Optical character recognition (OCR), which uses both grayscale and OCR features. We focus our efforts on translating the intersection-over-union (IOU) metric from the field of object detection to document layout analysis and quantify “high localization” levels as an IOU of 0.9. When applied to the astrophysics literature holdings of the NASA astrophysics data system, we find F1 scores of 90.9% (92.2%) for figures (figure captions) with the IOU cut-off of 0.9 which is a significant improvement over other state-of-the-art methods.