Title: Mathematical variable detection in scientific document images

Authors: Bui Hai Phong; Thang Manh Hoang; Thi-Lan Le

Addresses: MICA International Research Institute (HUST – CNRS/UMI2954 – Grenoble INP), Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam; Faculty of Information Technology, Hanoi Architectural University, Hanoi, Vietnam ' School of Electronics and Telecommunications, Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam ' MICA International Research Institute (HUST – CNRS/UMI2954 – Grenoble INP), Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam

Abstract: Mathematical expression detection in scientific documents is a prerequisite step for developing a mathematical retrieval system that has attracted many researches recently. In the detecting process, one challenging issue is the detection of variables. The similar properties of variables and narrative text cause many errors in the detection in existing approaches. In the paper, a novel detection methodology of variables in inline mathematical expressions is proposed. The merit of the method is that it can operate directly on the variable images without the employment of character recognition. The proposed method uses the features of projection profile of images and the fine-tuning of different machine learning algorithms in the detection process. The achieved accuracy varies from 86.14% to 94% for the detection of variables in inline expressions in document images in various public benchmark datasets. The performance comparison with existing methods demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Keywords: document analysis; mathematical expression extraction; italic detection; machine learning.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCVR.2021.111876

International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics, 2021 Vol.11 No.1, pp.66 - 89

Received: 18 Dec 2018
Accepted: 30 Jul 2019
Published online: 18 Dec 2020 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article