Abstract

In this paper, we describe a novel method for document layout analysis that is based on a Fuzzy Energy Matrix (FEM). A FEM is a two-dimensional matrix that contains the likelihood of text and non-text and is generated through the use of Fuzzy theory. The key idea is to define an Energy map for the document to categorize text and non-text. The proposed mechanism is designed for execution with a low-resolution document image, and hence our method has a fast processing speed. The proposed method has been tested on public ICDAR 2009 datasets to conduct a comparison against other state-of-the-art methods, and it was also tested with Korean documents. The results of the experiment indicate that this scheme achieves superior segmentation accuracy, in terms of both precision and recall, and also requires less time for computation than other state-of-the-art document image analysis methods.