Segmentation of Page Images Using the Area Voronoi Diagram

This paper presents a method of page segmentation based on the approximated area Voronoi diagram. The characteristics of the proposed method are as follows: (1) The Voronoi diagram enables us to obtain the candidates of boundaries of document components from page images with non-Manhattan layout and a skew. (2) The candidates are utilized to estimate the intercharacter and interline gaps without the use of domain-specific parameters to select the boundaries. From the experimental results for 128 images with non-Manhattan layout and the skew of 0°∼45° as well as 98 images with Manhattan layout, we have confirmed that the method is effective for extraction of body text regions, and it is as efficient as other methods based on connected component analysis.