A knowledge-based table recognition method for Chinese bank statement images

Automatic processing of large volume scanned Chinese bank statements is a urgent demand recently. Conventional methods can not well handle the following challenges of this problem: various layout styles, noises, and especially requirement of fast speed for large Chinese character set. This paper proposes a knowledge based table recognition method to meet fast speed requirement with good accuracy. Two kinds of knowledge are utilized to accelerate the identification of digit columns and the cell recognition: i) geometric knowledge about column alignment and quasi equal digit width, and ii) semantic knowledge about prior format based on the results from an optical character recognition (OCR) engine of digits. Experimental results on a real dataset show the effectiveness of our method.