Structural analysis of mathematical formulae with verification based on formula Description Grammar

Abstract

In this paper, a reliable and efficient structural analysis method for mathematical formulae is proposed for practical mathematical OCR. The proposed method consists of three steps. In the first step, a fast structural analysis algorithm is performed on each mathematical formula to obtain a tree representation of the formula. This step generally provides a correct tree representation but sometimes provides an erroneous representation. Therefore, the tree representation is verified by the following two steps. In the second step, the result of the analysis step, (i.e., a tree representation) is converted into a one-dimensional representation. The third step is a verification step where the one-dimensional representation is parsed by a formula description grammar, which is a context-free grammar specialized for mathematical formulae. If the one-dimensional representation is not accepted by the grammar, the result of the analysis step is detected as an erroneous result and alarmed to OCR users. This three-step organization achieves reliable and efficient structural analysis without any two-dimensional grammars. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.