The specialist board a technology workbench for document analysis and understanding

Document analysis and understanding (DAU) designates the task of transforming data from printed media into a symbolic form allowing a further processing by electronic means. In order to be able to solve different DAU problems, we have developed the so-called Specialist Board as a technology workbench for the recognition, categorization and structured representation of documents. The model provides a collection of software specialists for the various DAU subtasks and is basically used for rapid prototyping. In this paper we will show how these specialists can be successfully organized and combined for solving different problems. Furthermore, we will introduce the fundamental principles of the model and discuss the various specialists of the workbench.