Preattentive reading and selective attention for document image analysis

PixED (from Pixel to Electronic Document) is aimed at converting document images into structured electronic documents which can be read by a machine for information retrieval. The approach is based on the combination of perception and symbol reading which are the two processes involved when humans detect the organisation of a document. "Preattentive reading" denotes the physical segmentation related to perceptual organisation. "Selective attention" means that symbol reading is limited to specific sequences of symbols or to pre-attentively selected locations. An OCR provides the primary structured description of the document. PixED improves the quality of this description, completes the physical segmentation and adds a logical description. A distributed software architecture and an incremental strategy are defined to enable the integration of perception and symbol reading. The approach is tested on a set of documents composed of several pages which are gathered from proceedings of scientific conferences.