Document layout analysis for Indian newspapers using contour based symbiotic approach

Document layout analysis is necessary process for automated document recognition systems. Document layout analysis identifies, categorizes and labels the semantics of text blocks for meaningful information retrieval from document images. Our primary target document includes various newspaper and magazine pages which are having complex layout without following any static rules. We propose an effective approach for document layout analysis where power of bottom up approach and top-down approach i.e. region growing and segmentation respectively, have been utilized simultaneously. In this methodology various image morphological operations, contour analysis, connected component analysis, projection analysis are employed for the realization. The proposed algorithm has been successfully implemented and applied over a large number of Indian script newspaper and magazine pages. The results have been evaluated by number of blocks detected and taking their correct ordering information into account.