Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 14:58:03 GMT Server: NCSA/1.4.2 Content-type: text/html Last-modified: Tue, 13 Feb 1996 23:42:37 GMT Content-length: 2450
Problem Statement and Objectives
InfoAccess is a small Washington State company whose main product line
is
Guide, a collection of software modules that allow the semi-automatic
conversion of technical manuals to interactive electronic documents.
The manuals are typically technical documents such as installation,
operations and maintenance manuals, which contain large numbers of
complex diagrams. Diagrams are converted to images with ``hot spots,''
which are regions in which the user can click a mouse and receive
additional information or help. The hot spots are located where there
are ``callouts'' in the original diagram; these are numbers or text
identifying a portion of the diagram and usually adjacent to a straight
line or arrow pointing to this portion. Currently the callouts must be
located and identified by hand; this is slow and tedious. InfoAccess
would like an image analysis system that can automatically find the
callouts, read the numbers or text, and send an ASCII character string
plus the image coordinates of the callout to the appropriate GUIDE
package.
The problem to be solved in this work is the development of automatic methods for locating and recognizing patterns in complex technical document images. InfoAccess is currently most interested in the callouts, which are usually numbers or text, sometimes surrounded by circles or boxes, since automatic callout detection software would be of immediate use in their current product. However, developing a general approach will allow them to produce more powerful future products. Our objective for this work is to develop an approach to document pattern matching that is specifically applicable to the automatic callout recognition problem, that is easily extendable to recognition of more advanced patterns such as parts and subassemblies, that can be trained to recognize new patterns, and that is efficient and easy to use.