Adaptive detection of missed text areas in OCR outputs: application to the automatic assessment of OCR quality in mass digitization projects

Ahmed Ben Salah; Nicolas Ragot; Thierry Paquet

doi:10.1117/12.2003733

4 February 2013 Adaptive detection of missed text areas in OCR outputs: application to the automatic assessment of OCR quality in mass digitization projects

Ahmed Ben Salah, Nicolas Ragot, Thierry Paquet

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 8658, Document Recognition and Retrieval XX; 865816 (2013) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2003733
Event: IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging, 2013, Burlingame, California, United States

Abstract

The French National Library (BnF*) has launched many mass digitization projects in order to give access to its collection. The indexation of digital documents on Gallica (digital library of the BnF) is done through their textual content obtained thanks to service providers that use Optical Character Recognition softwares (OCR). OCR softwares have become increasingly complex systems composed of several subsystems dedicated to the analysis and the recognition of the elements in a page. However, the reliability of these systems is always an issue at stake. Indeed, in some cases, we can find errors in OCR outputs that occur because of an accumulation of several errors at different levels in the OCR process. One of the frequent errors in OCR outputs is the missed text components. The presence of such errors may lead to severe defects in digital libraries. In this paper, we investigate the detection of missed text components to control the OCR results from the collections of the French National Library. Our verification approach uses local information inside the pages based on Radon transform descriptors and Local Binary Patterns descriptors (LBP) coupled with OCR results to control their consistency. The experimental results show that our method detects 84.15% of the missed textual components, by comparing the OCR ALTO files outputs (produced by the service providers) to the images of the document.

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Ahmed Ben Salah, Nicolas Ragot, and Thierry Paquet "Adaptive detection of missed text areas in OCR outputs: application to the automatic assessment of OCR quality in mass digitization projects", Proc. SPIE 8658, Document Recognition and Retrieval XX, 865816 (4 February 2013); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2003733

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