Method and system for document image layout deconstruction and redisplay system

Abstract

The invention converts a document originating in a page-image format into a form suitable for an arbitrarily sized display, by reformatting or "re-flowing" of the document to fit an arbitrarily sized display device.

Description

[0001] 1. Field of Invention[0002] The invention relates generally to the problem of making an arbitrary document, conveniently readable on an arbitrarily sized display.[0003] 2. Description of Related Art[0004] Existing systems for rendering page-image versions of documents on display screens have required manual activities to improve the rendering, or clumsy panning mechanisms to view direct display of page images on wrong-sized surfaces. In particular, it has been necessary to either (1) key in the entire text manually, or (2) process the page images through an optical character recognition (OCR) system and then manually tag the resulting text in order to preserve visually important layout features.[0005] Problems with existing systems include: (a) high expense of manual keying and / or correcting of OCR results and manual tagging; (b) the risk of highly visible and disturbing errors in the text resulting from OCR mistakes; and (c) the loss of meaningful or aesthetically pleasing t...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

The invention provides methods and systems for converting page-image documents, such as scanned hardcopy documents, into a form that can be displayed on screens of arbitrary size. This is done by automatically reformatting or "reflowing" the document content using a process called reflowing. The invention also includes methods for analyzing the layout of the document and identifying important information like text lines and column boundaries. The resulting document can be conveniently viewed on handheld devices. The invention has several advantages over existing methods, including the ability to find text lines that are missed and the ability to accurately match text lines to their corresponding column boundaries.

Problems solved by technology

Existing systems for rendering page-image versions of documents on display screens have required manual activities to improve the rendering, or clumsy panning mechanisms to view direct display of page images on wrong-sized surfaces.

Problems with existing systems include: (a) high expense of manual keying and / or correcting of OCR results and manual tagging; (b) the risk of highly visible and disturbing errors in the text resulting from OCR mistakes; and (c) the loss of meaningful or aesthetically pleasing typeface and type size choices, graphics and other non-text elements; and (d) loss of proper placement of elements on the page.

Such problems are significant, for example, because book publishers are increasingly creating page-image versions of books currently being published, as well as books from their backlists.

While print-on-demand images can be re-targeted to slightly larger or slightly smaller formats by scaling the images, they cannot currently be re-used for most electronic book purposes without either re-keying the book into XML format, or scanning the page images using OCR and manually correcting the re-keyed and scanned images.

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