Document structure analysis algorithms: a literature survey

Document structure analysis can be regarded as a syntactic analysis problem. The order and containment relations among the physical or logical components of a document page can be described by an ordered tree structure and can be modeled by a tree grammar which describes the page at the component level in terms of regions or blocks. This paper provides a detailed survey of past work on document structure analysis algorithms and summarize the limitations of past approaches. In particular, we survey past work on document physical layout representations and algorithms, document logical structure representations and algorithms, and performance evaluation of document structure analysis algorithms. In the last section, we summarize this work and point out its limitations.