Table structure understanding and its performance evaluation

This paper presents a table structure understanding algorithm designed using optimization methods. The algorithm is probability based, where the probabilities are estimated from geometric measurements made on the various entities in a large training set. The methodology includes a global parameter optimization scheme, a novel automatic table ground truth generation system and a table structure understanding performance evaluation protocol. With a document data set having 518 table and 10,934 cell entities, it performed at the 96.76% accuracy rate on the cell level and 98.32% accuracy rate on the table level. (C) 2004 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.