Reflowing-driven paragraph recognition for electronic books in PDF

摘要

When reading electronic books on handheld devices, content sometimes should be reflowed and recomposed to adapt for small-screen mobile devices. According to people's reading practice, it is reasonable to reflow the text content based on paragraphs. Hence, this paper addresses the requirement and proposes a set of novel methods on paragraph recognition for electronic books in PDF. The proposed methods consist of three steps, namely, physical structure analysis, paragraph segmentation, and reading order detection. We make use of locally ordered property of PDF documents and layout style of books to improve traditional page recognition results. In addition, we employ the optimal matching of Bipartite Graph technology to detect paragraphs' reading order. Experiments show that our methods achieve high accuracy. It is noteworthy that, the research has been applied in a commercial software package for Chinese E-book production.