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Analysis of Documents Born Digital

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Handbook of Document Image Processing and Recognition

Abstract

While traditional document analysis has focused on printed media, an increasingly large portion of the documents today are generated in digital form from the start. Such “documents born digital” range from plain text documents such as emails to more sophisticated forms such as PDF documents and Web documents. On the one hand, the existence of the digital encoding of documents eliminates the need for scanning, image processing, and character recognition in most situations (a notable exception being the prevalent use of text embedded in images for Web documents, as elaborated upon in section “Analysis of Text in Web Images”). On the other hand, many higher-level processing tasks remain due to the fact that the design purpose of almost existing digital document encoding systems (i.e., HTML, PDF) is for display or printing for human consumption, not for machine-level information exchange and extraction. As such, significant amount of processing is still required for automatic information extraction, indexing, and content repurposing from such documents, and many challenges exist in this process. This chapter describes in detail the key technologies for processing documents born digital, with a focus on PDF and Web document processing.

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Further Reading

  • Web Document Analytics, Apostolos Antonacopoulos and Jianying Hu (Editors), World Scientific, 2004.

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  • PDF Explained, John Whitington, O’Reilly Media, 2011.

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  • Web Data Mining: Exploring Hyperlinks, Contents, and Usage Data, Bing Liu, Springer, 2011.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA

    Jianying Hu

  2. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, Republic of Korea

    Ying Liu

Authors
  1. Jianying Hu
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  2. Ying Liu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jianying Hu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    David Doermann

  2. Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France

    Karl Tombre

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Hu, J., Liu, Y. (2014). Analysis of Documents Born Digital. In: Doermann, D., Tombre, K. (eds) Handbook of Document Image Processing and Recognition. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-85729-859-1_26

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