抄録
Page segmentation is the task of extracting components of a document such as columns, textlines, figures and tables from a page image. This paper presents a method of page segmentation by analyzing background (white areas) of a page image. For page images without skew, it is known that white areas can be represented as white rectangles each of which maximally circumscribes white pixels. In general, however, extracted white rectangles include gaps between characters, words and those in figures which cause erroneous segmentation. Thus white rectangles need to be selected for correct segmentation. The characteristic point of our method is that the selection is based on the simple measure called effective area which is to estimate the effectiveness of a white rectangle as a delimiter of components by taking account of proximity with surrounding black areas. Our method correctly segmented 92.7% of components in 154 images of Japanese and English pages with various layout and resolution.
