A text image enhancement system based on segmentation and classification methods

摘要

I would like to welcome the attendees of the Hardcopy Document Processing (HDP) Workshop and thank them for their interest in this subject. >The stated purpose of the CIKM 2004 Conference "is to identify challenging problems facing the development of future knowledge and information systems." A major (and growing) challenge for industry and government is need to access and process the content of hardcopy documents. The focus of the workshop is to present current research and development in addressing this challenge. During the 1990s, CEOs realized that their companies'' intellectual assets represented the majority of corporate wealth. The discipline of knowledge management was born to leverage these resources. Intellectual assets are primarily contained in hardcopy document collections. Many of these collections were scanned, indexed, OCRed and placed upon corporate intranets to be employed to gain competitive advantage. >Businesses, particularly highly regulatedindustries such as pharmaceutical, environmental, and transportation, generate hardcopy records that must be retrievable to demonstrate compliance. Accurate document retrieval requires sufficient indexing. Unfortunately, sufficient indexing requires a priori knowledge of future, unknown requirements. >Many applications need to retrieve and process hardcopy documents on an on-going basis. In many cases, documents must be exploited in near-real time for their content to be actionable. Further, documents of interest tend to be very noisy and often contain multiple handwritten annotations or other marks. >Currently, the only viable solution is to be able to retrieve and process the content of OCRed documents. In virtually all situations, the cost, in either time or capital, of correcting OCR is prohibitive, and therefore either OCR accuracy must be improved, the ability to process noisy OCR must be improved, or new, innovative techniques must be developed to process text in the image domain. The ability to process hardcopy documents is a challenge of international importance and an appropriate workshop topic for this CIKM Conference. >The focus of the Hardcopy Document Processing Workshop is to bring together the text processing and information retrieval research communities along with the users who face the challenge of processing information from hardcopy documents. The purpose will be to gain a better understanding of the current state-of-the-art and needs of the user community by exchanging of ideas. The target audience will be a mixture of academia and researchers from the user communities.