Scan-to-XML for Vector Graphics: an experimental setup for intelligent browsable document generation

This paper describes an experimental setup, conducted in collaboration with the ISA research group of the LORIA laboratory, Oce-PLT, and students from the Ecole des Mines de Nancy. The main objective is to experiment an approach to develop a high level document analysis platform by composing existing bricks from a comprehensive library of state-of-the art algorithms. The test-case of this methodology consists in the realization of a fully automated method of generating a browsable, hyper-linked document from a simple scanned image. We concentrated our work on cutaway diagrams. These documents present the advantage of containing simple browsing semantics, in the sense that they consist of a clearly identifiable legend containing index references, plus a drawing containing one or more occurrences of the same indices. The setup described in this paper starts from a raw binary image of a cutaway diagram, and delivers an XML description matching the references of the legend with the indices in the image, and a browser for interpreting the XML generated map. The complete document treatment pipeline is conceived within a combined scripting and compiled library environment.