High-speed recognition of tabulated data

An experimental recognition system for tabular data is described. It recognizes vertical and horizontal lines and, if they form tabular data, it analyzes the tabular structure. The paper proposes a new method to extract dotted lines that allows few, if any, recognition errors. It also describes a new data structure for tabular data that is easily combined with character recognition, which consists of rectangles and their labels. The line and table recognition methods described here is characterized by the fact that it only entails scanning the image array once. Some experimental results are also discussed