A Table Detection Method for Multipage PDF Documents via Visual Seperators and Tabular Structures

—Table detection is always an important task of document analysis and recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective table detection method via visual separators and geometric content layout information, targeting at PDF documents. The visual separators refer to not only the graphic ruling lines but also the white spaces to handle tables with or without ruling lines. Furthermore, we detect page columns in order to assist table region delimitation in complex layout pages. Evaluations of our algorithm on an e-Book dataset and a scientific document dataset show competitive performance. It is noteworthy that the proposed method has been successfully incorporated into a commercial software package for largescale Chinese e-Book production. Keywords- table detection; table spotting; PDF documents; separators; ruling lines

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ICDAR
• Authors: Jing Fang, Liangcai Gao, Kun Bai, Ruiheng Qiu, Xin Tao, Zhi Tang
• Keywords: Commercial Software Package, Document Analysis, ICDAR 2011, Largescale, Page Columns