Structural Mixtures for Statistical Layout Analysis

A key limitation of current layout analysis methods is that they rely on many hard-coded assumptions about document layouts and can not adapt to new layouts for which the underlying assumptions are not satisfied. Another major drawback of these approaches is that they do not return confidence scores for their outputs. These problems pose major challenges in large scale digitization efforts where a large number of different layouts need to be handled and manual inspection of the results on each individual page is not feasible. This paper presents a novel statistical approach to layout analysis that aims at solving the above mentioned problems for Manhattan layouts. The presented approach models known page layouts as a structural mixture model. A probabilistic matching algorithm is presented that gives multiple interpretations of input layout with associated probabilities. First experiments on documents from the publicly available MARG dataset achieved below 5%error rate for geometric layout analysis.