The set of references that typically appear toward the end of journal articles is sometimes, though not always, a field in bibliographic (citation) databases. But even if references do not constitute such a field, they can be useful as a preprocessing step in the automated extraction of other bibliographic data from articles, as well as in computer-assisted indexing of articles. Automation in data extraction and indexing to minimize human labor is key to the affordable creation and maintenance of large bibliographic databases. Extracting the components of references, such as author names, article title, journal name, publication date and other entities, is therefore a valuable and sometimes necessary task. This paper describes a two-step process using statistical machine learning algorithms, to first locate the references in HTML medical articles and then to parse them. Reference locating identifies the reference section in an article and then decomposes it into individual references. We formulate this step as a two-class classification problem based on text and geometric features. An evaluation conducted on 500 articles drawn from 100 medical journals achieves near-perfect precision and recall rates for locating references. Reference parsing identifies the components of each reference. For this second step, we implement and compare two algorithms. One relies on sequence statistics and trains a Conditional Random Field. The other focuses on local feature statistics and trains a Support Vector Machine to classify each individual word, followed by a search algorithm that systematically corrects low confidence labels if the label sequence violates a set of predefined rules. The overall performance of these two reference-parsing algorithms is about the same: above 99% accuracy at the word level, and over 97% accuracy at the chunk level.

This article develops theoretical, algorithmic, perceptual, and interaction aspects of script legibility enhancement in the visible light spectrum for the purpose of scholarly editing of papyri texts. Novel legibility enhancement algorithms based on color processing and visual illusions are compared to classic methods in a user experience experiment. (1) The proposed methods outperformed the comparison methods. (2) Users exhibited a broad behavioral spectrum, under the influence of factors such as personality and social conditioning, tasks and application domains, expertise level and image quality, and affordances of software, hardware, and interfaces. No single enhancement method satisfied all factor configurations. Therefore, it is suggested to offer users a broad choice of methods to facilitate personalization, contextualization, and complementarity. (3) A distinction is made between casual and critical vision on the basis of signal ambiguity and error consequences. The criteria of a paradigm for enhancing images for critical applications comprise: interpreting images skeptically; approaching enhancement as a system problem; considering all image structures as potential information; and making uncertainty and alternative interpretations explicit, both visually and numerically.

Automated dewarping of camera-captured handwritten documents is a challenging research problem in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. Most available systems assume the shape of the camera-captured image boundaries to be anywhere between trapezoidal and octahedral, with linear distortion in areas between the boundaries for dewarping. The majority of the state-of-the-art applications successfully dewarp the simple-to-medium range geometrical distortions with partial selection of control points by a user. The proposed work implements a fully automated technique for control point detection from simple-to-complex geometrical distortions in camera-captured document images. The input image is subject to preprocessing, corner point detection, document map generation, and rendering of the de-warped document image. The proposed algorithm has been tested on five different camera-captured document datasets (one internal and four external publicly available) consisting of 958 images. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations have been performed to test the efficacy of the proposed system. On the quantitative front, an Intersection Over Union (IoU) score of 0.92, 0.88, and 0.80 for document map generation for low-, medium-, and high-complexity datasets, respectively. Additionally, accuracies of the recognized texts, obtained from a market leading OCR engine, are utilized for quantitative comparative analysis on document images before and after the proposed enhancement. Finally, the qualitative analysis visually establishes the system's reliability by demonstrating improved readability even for severely distorted image samples.