In recent years, (retro-)digitizing paper-based files became a major undertaking for private and public archives as well as an important task in electronic mailroom applications. As a first step, the workflow involves scanning and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of documents. Preservation of document contexts of single page scans is a major requirement in this context. To facilitate workflows involving very large amounts of paper scans, page stream segmentation (PSS) is the task to automatically separate a stream of scanned images into multi-page documents. In a digitization project together with a German federal archive, we developed a novel approach based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) combining image and text features to achieve optimal document separation results. Evaluation shows that our PSS architecture achieves an accuracy up to 93 % which can be regarded as a new state-of-the-art for this task.
@InProceedings{WIEDEMANN18.628, author = {Gregor Wiedemann and Gerhard Heyer}, title = "{Page Stream Segmentation with Convolutional Neural Nets Combining Textual and Visual Features}", booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {May 7-12, 2018}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair) and Khalid Choukri and Christopher Cieri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Koiti Hasida and Hitoshi Isahara and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Hélène Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Takenobu Tokunaga}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {979-10-95546-00-9}, language = {english} }
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