Research on optical formulas extraction

Automatic recognition and reconstruction of formulas are key parts in an OCR (optical character recognition) system. Mathematical formula extraction is the first step in this technique. Little has been done in this area. Some research was focused on mathematical formulas in printed documents. An approach containing both the MSE feature of CCXs and heuristic rules for mathematical formula extraction is proposed. The MSF feature of the CCXs based approach is used to extract isolated formulas from printed documents and some heuristic rules are used to extract the embedded formulas from image blocks. The experiments indicate that a combination of the two methods can obtain favorable results.