The T-Recs table recognition and analysis system

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach to table structure recognition as well as to layout analysis. The discussed recognition process differs significantly from existing approaches as it realizes a bottom-up clustering of given word segments, whereas conventional table structure recognizers all rely on the detection of some separators such as delineation or significant white space to analyze a page from the top-down. The following analysis of the recognized layout elements is based on the construction of a tile structure and detects row-and/or column spanning cells as well as sparse tables with a high degree of confidence. The overall system is completely domain independent, optionally neglects textual contents and can thus be applied to arbitrary mixed-mode documents (with or without tables) of any language and even operates on low quality OCR documents (e.g. facsimiles).