Document image analysis for digital libraries

Digital Libraries have many forms -- institutional libraries for information dissemination, document repositories for record-keeping, and personal digital libraries for organizing personal thoughts, knowledge, and course of action. Digital image content (scanned or otherwise) is a substantial component of all of these libraries. Processing and analyzing these images include tasks such as document layout understanding, character recognition, functional role labeling, image enhancement, indexing, organizing, restructuring, summarizing, cross linking, redaction, privacy management, and distribution. At the Palo Alto Research Center, we conduct research on several aspects of document analysis for Digital Libraries ranging from raw image transformations to linguistic analysis to interactive sensemaking tools. I shall describe a few recent research activities in the realm of document image analysis or their use in digital libraries.