Transforming paper documents into XML format with WISDOM++

The transformation of scanned paper documents to a form suitable for an Internet browser is a complex process that requires solutions to several problems.\udThe application of an OCR to some parts of the document image is only one of the problems. In fact,\udthe generation of documents in HTML format is easier\udwhen the layout structure of a page has been extracted\udby means of a document analysis process. The\udadoption of an XML format is even better, since it can\udfacilitate the retrieval of documents in the Web. Nevertheless,\udan effective transformation of paper documents\udinto this format requires further processing steps, namely document image classification and understanding. WISDOM++\udis a document processing system that operates\udin five steps: document analysis, document classification,\uddocument understanding, text recognition with an OCR,\udand text transformation into HTML/XML format. The\udinnovative aspects described in the paper are: the preprocessing algorithm, the adaptive page segmentation,\udthe acquisition of block classification rules using techniques from machine learning, the layout analysis based on general layout principles, and a method that uses document layout information for conversion to HTML/XML formats. A benchmarking of the system components implementing\udthese innovative aspects is reported