Aligning document layouts extracted with different OCR engines with clustering approach

• Main Authors: S. Tomovic, K. Pavlovic, M. Bajceta
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2021-09-01
• Series: Egyptian Informatics Journal
• Subjects: Document layout; Document indexing; Information retrieval; Clustering; OCR
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1110866520301638

Layout analysis is essential step in information extraction from scanned document images. In this paper we propose an algorithm for aligning layouts generated with different OCR engines. The main requirement is to always generate the same layout for the given document image regardless of OCR engine used for image processing. In that way information extraction from scanned documents, that is heavily dependent on fields positions in the document, does not depend on specific OCR engine. In other words, it is sufficient to maintain universal extractor knowledge and not necessary to train extractor explicitly with samples processed on specific OCR engine. The proposed algorithm can handle administrative documents with complex layout.