Item searching in forms: Application to French tax form

Cell searching is an important step in form analysis. Information in a form is contained mainly inside its cells. The goal of this paper is to describe a robust method to locate the items whose boundaries are lines without using any a priori information about the form. Our method is based on the detection of lines by Hough transform and on searching of cycles, corresponding to cell location, in a graph. Thanks to Hough transform, our approach is robust, skew independent and can be applied to several kind of lines such as continuous, dashed, doubled, etc