A Minimal and Sufficient Way of Introducing External Knowledge for Table Recognition in Archival Documents

摘要

We present a system that recognizes tables in archival documents. Many works were carried out on table recognition but very few on tables of historical documents. These are difficult to analyze because they are often damaged due to their age and conservation. Therefore we have to introduce knowledge to compensate for missing information and noise in these documents. As there is a very important number of documents of a same type, the cost is not significant to introduce this explicit knowledge. We also want to minimalize the cost to adapt the system for a given document type. The precision of the knowledge given by the user is dependent on the quality of the document. The more the document is damaged, the more the specification has to be precise. We will show in this article how an external minimal knowledge can be sufficient for an efficient recognition system for tables in archival documents.