Method and apparatus for document image processing

Abstract: Methods and apparatus for determining phrase frequency in an undecoded document text image without first converting the document to character codes. The method includes segmenting of the document image into word units without document image decoding, and morphological image processing to determine word unit characteristics for placement into equivalence classes utilizing non- content based information. All of the possible sequences of selected word units in reading order in the document constituting phrases are mapped into a list of corresponding sequences of the associated equivalence class labels for each selected image unit in the phrase, and the corresponding equivalence class sequences are analyzed to determine the frequency of the phrases.

Description: The invention relates to improvements in methods and apparatuses for document image processing, and more particularly to improvements for recognizing and determining the frequency of phrases in a document without first decoding the words or images or referring to an external lexical reference. In computer based electronic document processing, an attribute of the document(s) being processed which the operator often desires to know is the frequency with which some or all of the words occur. For example, Salton & McGill, Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval , Chapter 2, pp. 30, 36, McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1983, indicates that in information retrieval contexts, the frequency of use of a given term may correlate with the importance of that term relative to the information content of the document. Word frequency information can thus be useful for automatic document summarization and/or annotation. Word frequency information can also be used in locating, indexing, filing, sorting, or retrieving documents. Another use for knowledge of word frequency is in text editing. For example, one text processing device has been proposed for preventing the frequent use of the same words in a text by categorizing and displaying frequently occurring words of the document. A list of selected words and the number of occurrences of each word is formulated for a given text location in a portion of the text, and the designated word and its location is displayed on a CRT. An extension of this thesis is that knowledge of the frequency of sequences of words in reading order in a document, i.e., phrases, also is useful, for example, for automatic document summarization. Phrase frequency information can also be used in locating, indexing, filing, sorting, or retrieving documents. Heretofore, though, word frequency determinations have been performed on electronic texts in which the contents have been converted to a machine readable form, such as by decoding using some form of optical character recognition (OCR) in which bit mapped word unit images, or in some cases a number of characters within the word unit images, are deciphered and converted to coded representations of the images based on reference to an external character library. The decoded words or character strings are then compared with dictionary terms in an associated lexicon. Disadvantages of such optical character recognition techniques are that the intermediate optical character recognition step introduces a greater possibility of computational error and requires substantial time for processing, slowing the overall word unit identification process. European Patent Application No. 0-402-064 to Sakai et al. describes a text processing device in a computer system for counting the occurrence of words in a text and displaying a list of repetitive words on a CRT. The list includes the selected words together with their number of occurrences and their locations in the text. In a case where word repetition is undesirable, an operator may substitute synonyms or otherwise alter the text by using search, display, and editing actions. European Patent Application No. 0-364-179 to Hawley describes a method and apparatus for extracting key words from text stored in a machine-readable format. The frequency of occurrence of each word in a file, as compared to the frequency of occurrence of other words in the file, is calculated. If the calculated frequency exceeds by a predetermined threshold the frequency of occurrence of that same word in a reference domain appropriate to the file, then the word is selected as a key word for that file. European Patent Application No. 0-364-180 to Hawley describes a method and apparatus for automatically indexing and retrieving files in a large computer file system. Key words are automatically extracted from files to be indexed and used as the entries in an index file. Each file having one of the index entries as a key word is associated in the index with that key word. If a file is to be retrieved, and its content, but not its name or location, is known, its key words are entered and its identifying information will be displayed (along with that of other files having that key word), facilitating its retrieval. Bloomberg, "Multiresolution Morphological Approach to Document Image Analysis", First International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR 91, 30 September-2 October 1991, San Malo, FR, pages 963-971, discloses an image-based approach to document image analysis that employs morphological operations and is based on image properties of shape and texture. The approach can be applied to halftone and word segmentation and identification of words in italic and bold type styles. An object of the invention is to provide methods and apparatus for determining the frequency of occurrence of similar phrases in an undecoded document image without document image decoding. In one aspect of the invention, there is provided a method for determining a frequency of occurrence of significant word sequences in an undecoded electronic document text image, characterised by segmenting the document image into word units without decoding the document image content; determining at least one shape characteristic of selected word units in the document image; identifying equivalence classes of the selected word units in the document image by clustering the ones of the selected word units with similar shape characteristics, each equivalence class being assigned a label; determining the sequences of equivalence class labels corresponding to all sequences of said selected word units arranged in the order in which the selected word units appear in the document image; and evaluating said equivalence class label sequences to determine the frequency of each equivalence class label sequence. In another aspect of the invention, there is provided an apparatus for processing a digital image of text on a document to determine the frequency of word phrases in the text, characterised by meansfor segmenting the digital image into word units without decoding the digital image; means for determining at least one shape characteristic of selected ones of said word units; means for identifying equivalence classes of the selected word units in the document image by clustering the ones of the selected word units with similar shape characteristics, each equivalence class being assigned a label; means for determining the sequences of equivalence class labels corresponding to all sequences of said selected word units arranged in the order in which the selected word units appear in the document image; and means for classifying said sequences of equivalence class labels to determine the frequency of each equivalence class label sequence; and an output device for producing an output responsive to the relative frequencies of occurrence of the selected equivalence class label sequences. The present invention provides methods and apparatus for determining the frequency of phrases in a document directly from a stored image of the document, without first converting the document to optical character codes. The invention utilizes non-content image recognition techniques that compare image properties of word image units without the need to correlate bitmaps. The invention is not limited to systems utilizing document scanning. Rather, other systems such as a bitmap workstation (i.e., a workstation with a bitmap display) or a system using both bitmapping and scanning would work equally well for the implementation of the methods and apparatus described herein. The major advances of the claimed invention include being parallelizable, enabling performance in linear time, and providing for extracting word sequence frequency information without first converting a document to character codes, such as ASCII codes. Also, the invention reduces or eliminates the possible introduction of errors due to intermediate interpretation processes, such as optical character recognition. The method is more time and cost efficient than OCR algorithms or methods based on bitmap correlation. The present invention will be described further, by way of example, with reference to the accompanying drawings, in which: Figure 1 shows a flow chart of a method according to a preferred embodiment of the invention for determining phrase frequencies in text of a document without first converting the text of the document to character codes, and Figure 2 shows an apparatus according to a preferred embodiment of the invention for determining phrase frequencies in a text of a document without first decoding the image units or text or converting the image units or text in the document to character codes. A preferred embodiment of the method of the invention is illustrated in the flow chart of Figure 1, and apparatus for performing the method of Fig. 1 is shown in Figure 2. For the sake of clarity, the invention will be described with reference to the processing of a single document. However, it will be appreciated that the invention is applicable to the processing of a corpus of documents containing a plurality of documents. With reference first to Figure 2, the method is performed on an electronic image of an original document 5, which may include lines of text 7, titles, drawings, figures 8, or the like, contained in one or more sheets or pages of paper 10 or other tangible form. The electronic document image to be processed is created in any conventional manner, for example, by an input means, such as an optical scanner 12 and sensor 13 as shown, a copier machine scanner, a Braille reading machine scanner, a bitmap workstation, an electronic beam scanner or the like. Such means are well known in the art, and thus are not described in detail herein. An output derived from for example, a scanner sensor 13 is digitized to produce bit mapped image data representing the document image for each page of the document, which data is stored, for example, in a memory 15 of a special or general purpose digital computer 16. The digital computer 16 can be of the type that performs data driven processing in a data processing system which comprises execution processing means for performing functions by executing program instructions in a predetermined manner, such computers now being well known in the art. The output from the computer 16 is delivered to an output device, such as, for example, a memory or other form of storage unit, or an output display 17 as illustrated, which may be, for instance, a photocopier, CRT display, printer, facsimile machine, or the like. In accordance with the invention, the frequency of selected image units is first determined. Thus, with reference now to Figure 1, the first phase of the image processing technique of the invention involves a low level document image analysis in which the document image for each page is segmented into undecoded information containing image units (step 20) using conventional image analysis techniques; or, in the case of text documents, preferably using the bounding box method. The locations of and spatial relationships between the image units on a page are then determined (step 25). For example, an English language document image can be segmented into word image units based on the relative difference in spacing between characters within a word and the spacing between words. Sentence and paragraph boundaries can be similarly ascertained. Additional region segmentation image analysis can be performed to generate a physical document structure description that divides page images into labelled regions corresponding to auxiliary document elements like figures, tables, footnotes and the like. Figure regions can be distinguished from text regions based on the relative lack of image units arranged in a line within the region, for example. Using this segmentation, knowledge of how the documents being processed are arranged (e.g., left-to-right, top-to-bottom), and, optionally, other inputted information such as document style, a "reading order" sequence for word images can also be generated. The term "image unit" is thus used herein to denote an identifiable segment of an image such as a number, character, glyph, symbol, word, phrase or other unit that can be reliably extracted. Advantageously, for purposes of document review and evaluation, the document image is segmented into sets of signs, symbols or other elements, such as words, which together form a single unit of understanding. Such single units of understanding are characterized in an image as being separated by a spacing greater than that which separates the elements forming a unit. Such image units representing single units of understanding will be referred to hereinafter as "word units." Advantageously, a discrimination step 30 is next performed to identify the image units which have insufficient information content to be useful in evaluating the subject matter content of the document being processed. Such image units include stop or function words, i.e., prepositions, articles and other words that play a largely grammatical role, as opposed to nouns and verbs that convey topic information. One preferred method is to use morphological function word detection techniques. In this method, first a length and height of each image unit in the image is determined, and short image units are identified as image units of no more than a predetermined number of characters, preferably three characters or less in length. Next, image units which are not short image units are deleted from the image. Then, the image is blurred or smeared in a horizontal direction, although the image units are not smeared together. This can be accomplished for example by CLOSING the image with a horizontal structuring element having, e.g., a length of 5 pixels. The length of the horizontal structuring element used to blur the x-height characters in the image is dependent upon the width of the character type being used. Furthermore, other configurations of structuring elements may be used in the CLOSING operation to obtain the same smearing effect. However, the most efficient and effective way to smear characters of x-height is to use a horizontal structuring element as described above. A UNION of erosions is then taken of the image using a set of ascender matching structuring elements and a set of descender matching structuring elements. The UNION provides optional noise elimination filtering, and the UNION will provide a seed from which to fill short image unit masks in a subsequent seed filling operation such as a fillClip operation. The UNION acts on all image units remaining in the image (i.e., only short image units in this case) and since the UNION of erosions was taken using a set of ascender matching structuring elements and a set of descender matching structuring elements, the image units that will be filled are those containing ascender and/or descender characters, i.e., function words. The function words are then identified as those image units which are filled short image unit masks. Next, in step 40, selected image units, e.g., the image units not discriminated in step 30, are evaluated, without decoding the image units being classified or reference to decoded image data, based on an evaluation of predetermined image characteristics of the image units. The evaluation entails a determination (step 41) of the image characteristics and a comparison (step 42) of the determined image characteristics for each image unit with the determined image characteristics of the other image units. One preferred method for defining the image unit image characteristics to be evaluated is to use word shape derivation techniques. As described in that application, at least one, one-dimensional signal characterizing the shape of the word unit is derived; or an image function is derived defining a boundary enclosing the word unit, and the image function is augmented so that an edge function representing edges of the character string detected within the boundary is defined over its entire domain by a single independent variable within the closed boundary, without individually detecting and/or identifying the character or characters making up the word unit. As part of this process, baselines of the text on a page are determined (a baseline is a line extending under the non-descending characters on a text line). It will be appreciated that the ordering of the word units along the baselines, and the ordering of the baselines on each document image page provides the reading order of word units in the document image. The determined morphological characteristic(s) or derived image unit shape representations of each selected image unit are compared, as noted above (step 41), with the determined morphological characteristic(s) or derived image unit shape representations of the other selected image units for the purpose of identifying equivalence classes of image units (step 50), such that each equivalence class contains most or all of the instances of a given word in the document. The equivalence classes are thus formed by clustering the image units in the document based on the similarity of image unit classifiers, without actually decoding the contents of the image units, such as by conversion of the word images to character codes or other higher-level interpretation. Any of a number of different methods of comparison can be used. One technique that can be used, for example, is by correlating the raster images of the extracted image units using decision networks, such technique being described for characters in a Research Report entitled "Unsupervised Construction of Decision networks for Pattern Classification" by Casey et al., IBM Research Report, 1984, said Research Report being incorporated by reference herein. Preferred techniques that can be used to identify equivalence classes of word units are word shape comparison techniques. Depending on the particular application, and the relative importance of processing speed versus accuracy, for example, comparisons of different degrees of precision can be performed. For example, useful comparisons can be based on length, width (height) or some other measurement dimension of the image unit (or derived image unit shape representation, e.g., the largest figure in a document image); the location of the image unit in the document (including selected figure or paragraph of a document image, e.g., headings, initial figures, one or more paragraphs or figures), font, typeface, cross-section being a sequence of pixels of similar state in an image unit; the number of ascenders; the number of descenders; the average pixel density; the length of a top line contour, including peaks and troughs; the length of a base contour, including peaks and troughs; and combinations of such classifiers. It has been found that an adequate comparison for purposes of determining phrase frequency is to compare only the length and height of the derived image unit shape representations. Such a comparison is particularly fast, resulting in a highly efficient phrase frequency analysis which has proven to be sufficiently robust to reliably extract significant phrases in many text document applications. In instances in which multiple page documents are processed, each page is processed and the data held in the memory 15 (see Figure 1), as described above. The entirety of the data can then be processed. One way in which the image units can be conveniently compared and classified into equivalence classes is by comparing each image unit or image unit shape representation when it is formed with previously processed image units/shape representations, and if a match is obtained, the associated image unit is identified with the matching equivalence class. This can be done, for example, by providing a signal indicating a match and incrementing a counter or a register associated with the matching equivalence class. If the present image unit does not match with any previously processed image unit, then a new equivalence class is created for the present image unit. Alternatively, as shown (step 50) the image units in each equivalence class can be linked together, and mapped to an equivalence class label that is determined for each equivalence class. The size of each equivalence class is indicative of the frequency with which the image units in the class occur in the document image. Next (step 60), the sequences of equivalence class labels corresponding to all of the possible sequences of mapped image units in reading order (phrases) are analyzed to determine the frequency with which particular equivalence class label sequences, and hence the frequency with which the corresponding word unit phrases occur in the document. As used herein, a phrase is any sequence of adjacent word units which have been evaluated in reading order in the document. (It is not necessary that the stop or function words be discriminated prior to conducting the phrase frequency analysis.) Thus, the phrases include a master phrase consisting of the entire sequence of word units contained within a document image (or a portion thereof which has been selected for analysis), plus all of the subphrases contained within the master phrase. Any conventional method for sorting symbol strings or sequences and determining recurring subsequences can be used to evaluate the equivalence label sequences. Advantageously, since the frequency of word units in a phrase will have a frequency at least as great as the frequency of the phrase, a useful preliminary sort of the equivalence label sequences is to eliminate any sequences containing word units which occur only once or twice. Similarly, an initial sort advantageously searches for sequences in which each of the word units in the sequence is a high frequency word unit. The determination of what frequent phrases to identify as semantically significant phrases for purposes of further document processing, such as, for example, document summarization or categorization, depends on such variables as, for example, the length and style of the document, as well as the genre of its subject matter (e.g., technical literature versus fiction). Depending on all of the variables present in a particular situation, it may be advantageous either to select shorter length phrases having a relatively high frequency of occurrence, or longer length phrases having a lower frequency of occurrence. For example, in technical documents, it has been determined that two- or three-word phrases that occur at least about five times tend to be technical phrases indicative of the subject matter of the document. It will be appreciated that the choice of the most advantageous combination of frequent phrase selection parameters advantageously is determined empirically for a given application, and that the selection parameters are made settable so that they can be tuned for different applications. A salient feature provided by the technique of the invention is the processing, identification, comparison, or manipulation of image unit sequences without an accompanying requirement that the content of the image units be decoded, even for output. More particularly, phrases are determined, processed and delivered for output without decoding, so that in essence, the actual content of the image units or recognition of the phrases is never required to be determined. Thus, for example, in such applications as copier machines or electronic printers that can print or reproduce images directly from one document to another without regard to ASCII or other encoding/decoding requirements, image unit phrases can be identified, and processed using one or more morphological image characteristic of the image units. In the comparison process described, for instance, selected image units, of undetermined content, in the area of the document image of interest are compared with other image units in the document also of undetermined content. Entire phrases, still of undetermined content, can then be optically or electronically delivered for output, for example, to an image reproducing apparatus of a copy machine, an electronic memory, a visual display, or the like, for example in producing a list of significant phrases in order of frequency of appearance in the document image. The technique described above can be used to determine the significance of the phrases of a document, based upon the criterion of frequency of occurrence of a particular phrase. Thus, for example, the number of times a phrase appears can be used to construct a hierarchy of phrases, such hierarchy being useful for many purposes. It is noted, however, that the classifiers are determined without actually decoding the content of the image units; only the selected image classifiers of the image unit itself are used. The method can be applied, of course, to documents of multiple page length in a similar manner to that described above. Although the invention has been described and illustrated with a certain degree of particularity, it is understood that the present disclosure has been made only by way of example, and that numerous changes in the combination and arrangement of parts or steps can be resorted to by those skilled in the art without departing from the scope of the invention, as hereinafter claimed.

Claims: A method for determining a frequency of occurrence of significant word sequences in an undecoded electronic document text image, characterised by segmenting the document image into word units without decoding the document image content; determining at least one shape characteristic of selected word units in the document image; identifying equivalence classes of the selected word units in the document image by clustering the ones of the selected word units with similar shape characteristics, each equivalence class being assigned a label; determining the sequences of equivalence class labels corresponding to all sequences of said selected word units arranged in the order in which the selected word units appear in the document image; and evaluating said equivalence class label sequences to determine the frequency of each equivalence class label sequence. A method as claimed in claim 1, characterised in that said step of identifying equivalence classes of word units comprises correlating word unit shape characteristics using a decision network. A method as claimed in claim 1, characterised in that said step of identifying equivalence classes comprises comparing word unit shape representations of said word units. A method as claimed in claim 3, characterised in that said word unit shape representations are determined by deriving at least one, one-dimensional signal characterizing the shape of a word unit. A method as claimed in claim 3 or claim 4, characterised in that said word unit shape representations are determined by deriving a bounding box enclosing the word unit, without individually detecting and/or identifying the character or characters making up the word unit. A method as claimed in any one of claims 1 to 5, characterised in that said step of determining at least one shape characteristic of said word units comprises determining a dimension, of said selected word units. A method as claimed in any one of claims 3 to 6, characterised in that said comparison of said word shape representations compares only length and height dimensions of said word shape representations. An apparatus for processing a digital image of text (7) on a document (5) to determine the frequency of word phrases in the text (7), characterised by means (16) for segmenting the digital image into word units without decoding the digital image; means (16) for determining at least one shape characteristic of selected ones of said word units; means (16) for identifying equivalence classes of the selected word units in the document image by clustering the ones of the selected word units with similar shape characteristics, each equivalence class being assigned a label; means (16) for determining the sequences of equivalence class labels corresponding to all sequences of said selected word units arranged in the order in which the selected word units appear in the document image; and means (16) for classifying said sequences of equivalence class labels to determine the frequency of each equivalence class label sequence; and an output device (17) for producing an output responsive to the relative frequencies of occurrence of the selected equivalence class label sequences. An apparatus as claimed in claim 8, characterised in that said shape characteristic determining means (16) comprises means (16) for deriving at least one, one-dimensional signal characterizing the shape of a word unit. An apparatus as claimed in claim 8, characterised in that said shape characteristic determining means (16) comprises means (16) for deriving a bounding box enclosing the word unit, without individually detecting and/or identifying the character or characters making up the word unit.

Inventors: RAO RAMANA R, WITHGOTT M MARGARET, RAO, RAMANA R., WITHGOTT, M. MARGARET
Applicants: XEROX CORP, XEROX CORPORATION
Application year: 1992
Main classification: G06K9
IPC codes: G06K9, G06F17, G06T11