Retrieving Imaged Documents in Digital Libraries Based on Word Image Coding
Yue Lu, Li Zhang, Chew Lim Tan
Department of Computer Science, School of Computing
National University of Singapore, Kent Ridge, Singapore 117543
{luy, zhangli,tancl}@comp.nus.edu.sg
Abstract
A great number of documents are scanned and archived
in the form of digital images in digital libraries, to make
them available and accessible in the Internet. Information
retrieval in these imaged documents has become a growing
and challenging problem. For this purpose, a word image
coding technique is proposed in this paper, and a web-based
system for efficiently retrieving imaged documents from
digital libraries is described. Some image preprocessing
is first carried out off-line to extract word objects from
imaged documents stored in the digital library. Then each
word object is represented by a string of feature codes.
As a result, each document image is represented by a
series of feature code strings of its words, which are
stored in a feature code file. Upon receiving a user’s
request, the server converts the query word into feature
code string using the same conversion mechanism as
is used in producing feature codes for the underlying
imaged documents. Searching is then performed among
those feature code files generated offline. An inexact string
matching technique, with the ability of matching a word
portion, is applied to match the query word with the words
in the documents, and then the occurrence frequency of the
query word in each corresponding document is calculated
for relevant ranking. Preliminary experimental results with
some imaged documents of students’ theses in the digital
library of our university show that the proposed approach
is efficient and promising for retrieving imaged documents,
with potential applications to digital libraries.
1. Introduction
Modern technology has made it possible to produce,
process, store, and transmit document images efficiently. As
we look through the documents stored in digital libraries,
in particular, the digital library of our university, large
quantities of them are simply scanned and archived in image
form that cannot directly employ the current powerful
search engines over text documents. Meanwhile, with the
need of making digital library an online store of books,
magazines, student theses, etc, so that users would be able
to do a search on a set of keywords and get a list of relevant
articles, for viewing or printing, it is necessary to develop
an efficient information retrieval method to facilitate access
to these imaged documents.
In the past years, various ways have been studied
to query on imaged documents using physical (layout)
structure and logical (semantic) structure information as
well as extracted contents such as image features. For
example, Worring and Smeulders[1] proposed a document
retrieval method employing the information of implicit
hypertext structure extracted from original documents.
Jaisimha et al[2] described a system with the ability of
retrieving both text and graphics. Appiani et al[3] presented
a document classification and indexing system using the
information of document layouts.
However, for those imaged documents where text
content is the dominant information, the content-based
retrieval approach, in particular, querying by words is
still commonly used. It is obvious that the technique
of conventional document image processing can be
utilized for this purpose. For example, a document image
processing system is used to automatically convert a
document image to its machine-readable text codes first,
and text information retrieval strategies[4] are applied
then. Based on this idea, several commercial systems
have been developed using techniques of document
page segmentation and layout analysis, followed by
optical character recognition(OCR). These include Heinz
Electronic Library Interactive On-line System (HELIOS)
developed by Carnegie Mellon University[5], Excalibur
EFS[6], and PageKeeper[7] from Caere. All these systems
require a full conversion of the document images into
their electronic representations, followed by a text retrieval.
However, OCR performance highly relies on the quality of
the scanned images. It deteriorates severely if the image is
of poor quality and with high distortion.
It is generally acknowledged that the recognition
accuracy requirements for document image retrieval are
considerably lower than that for many document processing
applications[8]. Motivated by this observation, some
methods with the ability of tolerating recognition errors of
OCR have been researched recently[9, 10]. Additionally,
some methods are reported to improve the retrieval
performance by using the OCR candidates[11, 12].
In recent years, there have been much interests in
the research area of document image retrieval[13, 14],
which avoids the use of OCR for retrieving information
from imaged documents. Document image retrieval(DIR)
is relevant to document image processing(DIP), but there
are some essential differences between them. A DIP system
needs to analyze different text areas in a page document,
understand the relationship among these text areas, and then
convert them to a machine-readable version using OCR, in
which each character object is assigned to a certain class.
The main question that a DIR system seeks to answer
is whether a document image contains particular words
which are of interest to the user, while paying no attention
to other unrelated words. In other word, a DIR system
provides an answer of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ with respect to the user’s
query, rather than the exact recognition of a character/word
like that in DIP. Moreover, words, rather than characters,
are the basic meaningful units for information retrieval. In
particular, to overcome the problem caused by character
segmentation, segmentation-free approaches have been
developed to avoid the segmentation step, i.e. word image
matching approach. This approach treats each word as a
single, individual entity and identifies it using features of
the entire word rather than each individual character. Some
document image retrieval methods based on word image
matching have been proposed recently by researchers.
Therefore, directly matching word images in a document
image is an alternative way to retrieve information from the
imaged documents.
It is a fact that the information retrieval methods based
on the technology of document image processing are still
the best so far, because a great deal of research has been
devoted to this area, and numerous algorithms have been
proposed in the past decades, especially for the research of
OCR. However, DIR and DIP address different needs and
have different merits of their own. The former which is
tailored for directly retrieving information from document
images could achieve a relatively higher performance in
terms of recall, precision, and processing speed. Therefore,
DIR which bypasses OCR still has its practical value today.
A lot of efforts regarding document image retrieval
research have been reported so far, with the applications
to word spotting[15, 16, 17, 18], document similarity
measurement[19, 20, 21, 22], document indexing[23],
summarization[24], etc. Among them, one approach is
using particular codes to represent the characters in a
document, instead of full OCR. It is virtually a trade-off
between computational complexity and recognition
accuracy. For example, Sptiz described character shape
codes for duplicate document detection[21], information
retrieval[22], word recognition[25] and document
reconstruction[26], without resorting to full character
recognition. The character shape codes encode whether or
not the character in question fits between the baseline and
the x-line or if not, whether it has an ascender or descender,
and the number of spatial distribution of the connected
components. Its processing is very simple to get character
shape codes from document images, but ambiguity is a
problem. Additionally, to get the character shape codes,
character cells must be segmented at the first step. It is
therefore unsuitable to deal with words with connected
characters, especially heavily touched characters. In the
domain of Chinese document image retrieval, He et al.[23]
proposed an index and retrieval method based on character
codes generated from stroke density.
In this paper, we propose a word image coding scheme
for designing a system which is able to retrieve imaged
documents in digital libraries. The differences between our
work and Spitz’s can be summarized as: (1)We extract the
codes at the word level, rather than at the character level,
to dispense with the need to separate connected characters.
(2)Compared to Sptiz’s work, the procedure of computing
word image codes in our work is more complicated, but
results in an advantage of eliminating ambiguity among
words.
The present system, based on the proposed word image
coding scheme and matching approach, has been tested in
an experimental platform developed for the digital library
of National University of Singapore (NUS) with imaged
documents generated from past undergraduate theses. The
overall results are encouraging.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: in
the next section, we briefly illustrate the overall framework
of our system. The details of our word image coding
are presented in Section 3. In Section 4, we describe the
process of converting a PDF file containing pages of imaged
documents to a feature code file containing the information
of its individual words. In Section 5, we elaborate the
word matching algorithm exploited in matching the feature
codes. In Section 6, we detail the implementation of our
experimental system and the test results. Finally, we draw
some conclusions and point out future works in Section 7.
2. System Structure Overview
For explanation sake, we first briefly introduce the
system structure. Figure 1 illustrates the overall system
framework and its workflow, for retrieving imaged
documents in a digital library. First of all, some image
 Client Internet
Display
Search Results
Results
Merge results based on “AND”
“OR” or “NOT” Operation
that the user has specified
Matched?
N
Search
Input
Index Table
Query Words &
Logical Operation
(AND,OR, NOT)
Index
Table
(Oracle
Database)
Database
Figure 1. System diagram
processing is carried out on the document images embedded
in the PDF files, including connected component detection,
skew estimation and rectification(if applicable), word object
bounding, etc. Next, each word object is represented using
the word image coding as described below. With respect
to each PDF file, a feature code file is then constructed,
including the URL of the corresponding PDF file, and each
word’s information, such as its location, word image codes.
This feature code file is stored in a server, and will be
used instead of the original document images for document
retrieval. The above processing is performed off-line prior
to the user’s online query.
On the client side, the user is prompted to input a set
of query words through a web interface, in particular, an
Active Server Page (ASP). Meanwhile, they can choose
to perform logical operation(“AND”,“OR”,“NOT”) among
these query words. Once the request is submitted to the
server, the server will start processing each query word and
merge the results at the end of each step based on the logical
operation the user has chosen. Finally, a temporary table
that stores all the matching documents with their URLs and
the normalized occurrence frequencies of the query words
will be returned to the user for display. The user will be
able to link to the actual documents for online reading or
download them for future reference.
As for the processing of each query word, it is done
as follows: First, the server tries to search for the query
word in an index table stored in an Oracle database. This
Server
Imaged
Document
Archive
(PDF Files)
Image
Preprocessing
Word Object
Bounding
Convert Query Word Search Feature Coding Files
to Code Representation Code Files
Offline Operations
Add to Matched?
Index Table Y
index table is used to store information of the words that
have previously been searched. Hence, if there are matches,
information of the corresponding documents that contain
this query word will be retrieved and stored in a temporary
table for subsequent merging. This includes information of
the documents’ URLs as well as the normalized occurrence
frequency of the query word appearing in each of these
documents. Otherwise, if no matches are found in the index
table, we generate the feature code string of the query word,
and then exploit the word matching algorithm to perform
search in the underlying feature code files.
With the purpose of constructing an incremental
intelligence system and speeding up the search process,
the results of earlier query searches are stored in the
index table. If there are newly found matches, the index
table will be updated accordingly, i.e. the corresponding
query word will be added to the index table with the
current document’s name with its URL and the normalized
occurrence frequency that the query word appears in this
document.
3. Word Image Coding
A word object extracted from the document images
is represented by the word image codes according to
it features. The features employed in our approach are
Left-to-Right Primitive String(LRPS) which is a code string
sequenced from the leftmost of a word to its rightmost.
The line feature and traversal feature will be used to extract
primitives of the word image.
A word printed in documents can be in various sizes,
fonts, and spacings. When we extract features from word
bitmaps, we have to take this fact into consideration.
Generally speaking, it is easy to find a way to cope
with different sizes. But dealing with multiple fonts and
touching characters caused by condensed spacing, is still
a challenging issue.
For a word image in a printed text, two characters
could be spaced apart by a few white columns caused by
intercharacter spacing in general, as shown in Figure 2(a).
But it is also common that one character overlaps with
another by a few columns caused by kerning, as shown
in Figure 2(b). Worse still, as shown in Figure 2(c), two
or more adjacent characters may touch each other due to
condensed spacing. This poses a challenge to us to separate
such touching characters. We will utilize inexact feature
string matching to handle this problem.
fr(a)
fr (b)
fr(c)
Figure 2. Different Spacing: (a)separated
adjacent characters, (b) overlapped adjacent
characters, (c) touched adjacent characters
3.1. LRPS Feature Representation
A word is explicitly segmented, from the leftmost to the
rightmost, to discrete entities. Each entity, called a primitive
here, is represented using definite attributes. A primitive p
will be described using a two-tuple (σ, ω), where σ is the
Line-or-Traversal Attribute(LTA) of the primitive and ω is
the Ascender-and-Descender Attribute(ADA). As a result,
the word image is then expressed as a sequence P of pi ’s.
P =< p1 p2 . . . pn >=< (σ1 , ω1 )(σ2 , ω2 ) . . . (σn , ωn ) >
(1)
where the ADA of a primitive ω ∈ Ω={‘x’,‘a’,‘A’,‘D’,‘Q’},
which are defined as:
‘x’: the primitive is between the x-line and the baseline.
‘a’: the primitive is between the top-boundary and the
x-line.
‘A’: the primitive is between the top-boundary and the
baseline.
‘D’: the primitive is between the x-line and the
bottom-boundary.
‘Q’: the primitive is between the top-boundary and the
bottom-boundary.
The definition of x-line, baseline, top-boundary and
bottom-boundary may be found in Figure 3. A word bitmap
extracted from a document image already contains the
information of baseline and x-line, which is a by-product
of the text line extraction in the previous stage.
3.2. Generating Line-or-Traversal Attribute
The generation of LTA is performed in two steps. We
extract the straight stroke line feature from the word bitmap
first, as shown in Figure 3(a). Note that only the vertical
stroke lines and diagonal stroke lines are extracted in this
stage. Then the traversal features of the remainder part are
computed. Finally, the features from the above two steps
are aggregated to generate the LTAs of the corresponding
primitives. In other words, the LTA of a primitive is
represented by either a straight line feature(if applicable)
or a traversal feature.
3.2.1. Straight Stroke Line Feature A run-length based
method is utilized to extract the straight stroke lines from
word images. We use R(a, θ) to represent a directional run,
which is defined by a set of black concatenating pixels that
contains pixel a, along the specified direction θ. |R(a, θ)|
is the run length of R(a, θ), which is the number of black
points in the run.
The straight stroke line detection algorithm is
summarized as follows:
(1)Along the middle line(between the x-line and
base-line), detect the boundary pair [Al , Ar ] of each stroke,
where Al and Ar are the left and right boundary points
respectively.
(2) Detect the midpoint Am of a line segment Al Ar .
(3) Calculate R(Am , θ) for different θ, from which we
select θmax as the As ’s run direction.
(4) If |R(Am , θmax )| is near to or larger than the
x-height, the pixels containing Am , between the boundary
points Al and Ar , along the direction θmax , are extracted as
a stroke line.
As shown in Figure 3, the stroke lines are extracted
as in Figure 3(a), while the remainder is in Figure 3(b).
According to the direction of a line, it is assigned to one
of three basic stroke lines: vertical stroke line, left-down
diagonal stroke and right-down diagonal stroke. With
respect to these types of stokes, three basic primitives
are generated from the extracted stroke lines. Meanwhile,
their ADAs can be assigned based on their top-end
and bottom-end positions. Their LTAs are respectively
expressed as:
‘l’: vertical straight stroke line, such as that in the
characters ‘l’, ‘d’, ’p’, ‘q’, ‘D’, ‘P’, etc. For the primitive
whose ADA is ‘x’ or ‘D’, we will further check whether

Figure 3. Primitive string extraction (a)
straight stroke line features, (b) remainder
part of (a), (c) traversal TN = 2, (d) traversal
TN = 4, (e) traversal TN = 6
there is a dot over the vertical stroke line. If yes, the LTA of
the primitive is re-assigned as ‘i’.
‘v’: right-down diagonal straight stroke line, such as that
in the characters ‘v’, ‘w’, ‘V’, ‘W’, etc.
‘w’: left-down diagonal straight stroke line, such as that
in the characters ‘v’, ‘w’, ‘z’, etc. For the primitive whose
ADA is ‘x’ or ‘A’, we will further check whether there are
two horizontal stroke lines connected with it at the top and
bottom. If so, the LTA of the primitive is re-assigned as ‘z’.
Additionally, it is easy to detect primitives containing
two or more straight stroke lines. They are:
‘x’: one left-down diagonal straight stroke line crosses
one right-down diagonal straight stroke line.
‘y’: one left-down diagonal straight stroke line meets one
right-down diagonal straight stroke line at its middle point.
‘Y’: one left-down diagonal stroke line, one right-down
diagonal stroke line and one vertical stroke line cross in one
point, like character ‘Y’.
‘k’: one left-down diagonal stroke line, one right-down
diagonal stroke line and one vertical stroke line meet in one
point, like character ‘k’ and ‘K’.
3.2.2. Traversal Feature After the primitives based on
the stroke line features are extracted as described above,
the primitives of the remainder part in the word image is
computed based on the traversal features.
To extract the traversal feature, we scan the word image
column by column, and the traversal number TN is recorded
by counting the number of transitions from black pixel
to white pixel, or vice versa, along each column. This
processing is not carried out on the part represented by
stroke line features as described above. According to the
value of TN , different feature codes are assigned as follows.
‘&’: there is no image pixel in the column(TN = 0).
It corresponds to the blank intercharacter space. We treat
intercharacter space as a special primitive. In addition, the
overlap of adjacent characters caused by kerning is easily
detected by analyzing the relative positions of the adjacent
connected components. We can insert a space primitive
between them in this case.
If TN = 2, two parameters are utilized to assign it a
feature code. One is the ratio of its black pixel number to
x-height, κ. The other is its relative position with respect to
the x-line and the base line, ξ = Dm /Db , where Dm is the
distance from the topmost stroke pixel in the column to the
x-line and Db is the distance from the bottommost stroke
pixel to the baseline.
‘n’: κ < 0.2 and ξ < 0.3
‘u’: κ < 0.2 and ξ > 3
‘c’: κ > 0.5 and 0.5 < ξ < 1.5
If TN ≥ 4, the feature code is assigned as:
‘o’: TN = 4
‘e’: TN = 6
‘g’: TN = 8
Then the same feature codes in the consecutive columns
are merged and represented by one primitive. Note that
a few columns possibly have no resultant feature codes
because they cannot meet the requirements of all eligible
feature codes described above, which is usually caused by
noise. Such columns are eliminated directly.
As illustrated in Figure 3, the word image is decomposed
into one part with stroke lines(as in Figure 3(a)) and other
parts with different traversal numbers(refer to Figure 3(c)
for TN = 2,(d) for TN = 4 and (e) for TN = 6).
The number of legal combination of primitive’s two
properities, i.e. σ and ω, is limited. For conciseness
sake, each legal 2-tuple is replaced by one exact letter,
as listed in Table 1. Then, the primitive code string
is composed by concatenating the above generated
primitives from the leftmost to the rightmost. The
resultant primitive string of the word image in
Figure 3 will be <nmuomuomonomu&Odomn&ceo
&oemuOd&ndoOdonomu&y>.
3.3. Postprocessing
To achieve the ability of dealing with different fonts,
the primitives should be independent of typefaces. Among
various fonts, a significant difference that has an impact on
the extraction of LRPS is serif, especially for that expressed
by traversal features. Figure 4 gives some examples in
which some have serif whereas some have not. It is a basic
necessity to avoid the effect of serif in LRPS representation.
 Primitive properties
(o,x)
Coding represention
o
health (Times Roman) health (Arial)

(e,x)
(l,x) m
e
health (Bookman) health (Helvetica)
(c,x) c
(n,x) n health (Courier)
KHDOWK (Tahoma)
(u,x) u

KHDOWK KHDOWK
(v,x) v
(w,x) w (Century) (Verdana)

(g,D) g
(i,A) i Figure 4. Different fonts
(i,Q) j
(k,x) k
(x,x) x For example, the primitive string token of character ‘b’ is
(y,D) y <doc>, and that of character ‘p’ is <qoc>. Table 2 lists the
(z,x) z primitive string tokens of all characters. The primitive string
(l,A) d of a word can be generated by synthesizing the primitive
(l,D) q string token of each characters in the word and inserting a
(u,a) T special primitive <&> among them to identify a spacing
(c,a) P gap.
(o,A) O Generally speaking, the resulting primitive string of
(e,A) E a real image is not as perfect as that synthesized from
(c,A) C the standard PST of corresponding characters, due to a
(v,A) V multitude of facts such as connection between adjacent
(w,A) W characters, noise effect, etc. As shown in Figure 3, the
(k,A) K primitive substring with respect to character ‘h’ is changed
(x,A) X from <dnm> to <dom> because of the effect of noise.
(Y,A) Y The touched characters ‘al’ and ‘th’ have also affected the
(z,A) Z corresponding primitive substrings. Inexact matching will
(e,Q) Q be employed in Section 5 to develop robust matching.

Table 1. Primitive properties vs. coding

representation
3.4. validity verification

Our observation shows that a primitive produced by
serif can be eliminated by analyzing its preceding and
succeeding primitives. For instance, a primitive ‘u’ in a
primitive subsequence <du&> is normally generated by
a right-side serif of characters such as ‘a’, ‘h’, ‘m’, ‘n’,
‘u’, etc. Therefore, we can remove the primitive <u> from
a primitive subsequence <du&>. Similarly, a primitive
<o> in a primitive subsequence <nom> is normally
generated by a serif of characters such as ‘h’, ‘m’, ‘n’,
etc. Therefore, we can directly eliminate the primitive <o>
from a primitive subsequence <nom>.
More postprocessing rules can be used to eliminate
the primitives caused by serif. With this postprocessing,
the primitive string of the word in Figure 3 will become
<mumuomnm&dom&ceo&oemd&ndodnm&y>.
Based on the feature extraction described above, we can
give each character a standard primitive string token(PST).
We use an English dictionary including 25133
commonly used words to evaluate the validity of the
proposed word image coding scheme. Each word
is represented by its corresponding word primitive
token(WPT) generated by aggregating the characters’
primitive string tokens described above, according to
the character sequence of the word, with the special
primitive <&> inserted between two adjacent PSTs.
For example, the WPT of the word “health” will be
<dnm&ceo&oem&d&ndo&dnm>.
The investigation found that each word in the dictionary
has a unique coding representation which can be
distinguished from others, although there is ambiguity at
character level, e.g. the PSTs of character ‘l’ and ‘I’ are
same. This concludes that there is no ambiguity for our
coding scheme, but at the cost of more computational
burden compared to Sptiz’s coding scheme.
 Ch PST Ch PST
[FileName]
a oem A WV b20169802.pdf
b doc B dEd [url]
c co C CO http://137.132.82.156/ASP/DataStore/p1206dpdf/b20169802.pdf
[NumberOfPage]
d cod D dOC
114
e ceo E dE [NumberOfWord]
f ndT F dOT 34591
g g G COEO <WordInfo>
……
h dnm H dnd [FeatureCode]
i i I d -mnmnm*coc*cod*mum*d*oem*mn-
j j J ud [x]
k k K K 1
[PageNo]
l d L du 12
m mnmnm M dVWd [Location]
n mnm N dVd 231,1058,256,1129
o coc O COC ……
[FeatureCode]
p qoc P dOP -ceo*d*ceo*mnmnm*ceo*mnm*ndo-
q coq Q COQC [x]
r mn R dOEO 1
s oeo S OEO [PageNo]
85
t ndo T TdT [Location]
u mum U dud 198,1422,236,1496
v vw V VW ……
w vwvw W VWVW </WordInfo>
x x X X
y y Y Y Figure 5. Code file for a PDF with imaged
z z Z Z documents

Table 2. Primitive string tokens of characters

are also available for the subsequent processing. Extracted

4. Coding File Generation
With respect to each imaged document file, a
corresponding feature code file is generated off-line prior to
the online searching procedure. The documents used in our
system are scanned from students’ theses and are packed
in PDF files. Each PDF file has over 100 images in page
format. We need to extract each of these page images first
for further processing.
Given a page image in a document, a connected
component analysis algorithm is first applied to detect all
the connected components. Those with too small areas are
considered as noise and thereby removed. Furthermore,
those with large areas are probably graphics or tables and
are therefore eliminated as well. It is presumed that the
processes such as skew estimation[27] and correction if
applicable, and other image-quality related processing, are
performed.
Next, word objects are bounded based on a merger
operation on the connected components. The left, top, right,
and bottom coordinates of each word bitmap are obtained.
Meanwhile the baseline and x-line locations in each word
word bitmaps with baseline and x-line information are the
basic units for the downstream process of word matching,
and are represented using primitive strings, as described in
earlier section.
It is worth mentioning that, the ascender/descender
information of words is very helpful for the word matching.
In particular, it can be utilized in coarse matching to speed
up the processing. Here we call it x-feature, which is defined
as:
0: There is neither ascender nor descender in the word;
1: There is ascender but no descender in the word;
2: There is no ascender but descender in the word;
3: There are both ascender and descender in the word.
As a result, with respect to the PDF document file, a
corresponding feature code file containing the information
of all words’ primitive codes and locations, x-features, as
well as the URL of the PDF file, is generated and stored in
the server. Figure 5 gives an example of a feature code file
recording the information of a PDF file with 114 pages of
images.
5. Word Matching
5.1. Coarse Matching
As the name indicates, coarse match is essentially a
confinement step, which serves the purpose of restricting
the number of words to be compared in the feature code
files within a narrow limit. This will effectively speed up the
word matching algorithm. The main criterion used in coarse
matching is word’s x-feature and the number of primitive
codes.
At the first step, the x-features are applied. Considering
that a query word is possibly a portion of a word in the
imaged documents, e.g. the word “unhealthy” should be
matched if the query word is “health”, the following criteria
are used: (1)if the x-feature of query word is 0, all words
in the documents are matched; (2)if the x-feature of the
query word is 1, only the words whose x-features are either
1 or 3 are matched; (3)if the x-feature of the query word
is 2, only the words whose x-features are either 2 or 3 are
matched; and (4)if the x-feature of the query word is 3,
only the words whose x-features are 3 are matched. For
example, if the query word is “health”, any word objects
without ascenders(x-feature equals 0 or 2) will be ruled out.
Next, the number in the primitive codes is applied.
Suppose the number of the query word’s primitive codes
is NQ , and that of a word object’s codes is NW . The ratio
of NW to NQ is considered. If NW /NQ is less than a
threshold, say 0.8 in our experiments , the word object will
be eliminated for further matching.
Last but not least, the final step is to apply inexact codes
string matching algorithm described below, to compare the
feature code of the query word and the feature codes of
word objects extracted from the original document images.
5.2. Inexact Codes String Matching
An inexact string matching method is applied to measure
the similarity between two primitive coding strings. The
word matching problem can be stated as finding a
particular sequence/sub-sequence in the primitive string
of a word. The procedure of matching word image has
become a measurement of the similarity between the
string A=< a1 , a2 , . . . , an > representing the features
of query word and the string B=< b1 , b2 , . . . , bm >
representing the features of a word image extracted
from the document. Matching partial words becomes
evaluating the similarity between the feature string A with
a sub-sequence of the feature string B. For example, the
problem of matching the word “health” with the word
“unhealthy” in Figure 3 is to find whether there exists the
subsequence A=<dnm&ceo&oem&d&ndo&dnm> in the
primitive sequence of word “unhealthy”.
In a word image, it is common for two or more
adjacent characters to be connected with each other,
which is possibly caused by low scanning resolution or
poor printing quality. This will result in the deletion
of the feature <&> in the corresponding feature string,
compared to the primitive string generated from the
standard PSTs. Moreover, noise effect will undoubtedly
produce substitution or insertion of features in the primitive
string of the word image. The deletion, insertion and
substitution are very similar to the course of evolutionary
mutations of DNA sequences in molecular biology[28].
Lopresti and Zhou applied the inexact string matching
strategy to information retrieval[29] and duplicate
document detection[30] for dealing with imprecise
text data of OCR results. Drawing inspiration from the
alignment problem of two DNA sequences and the progress
achieved by Lopresti and zhou, we apply the technique of
inexact string matching to evaluate the similarity between
two primitve strings, one from the template image and the
other from the word image extracted from the document.
From the standpoint of string alignment[31], two differing
features that mismatch correspond to a substitution; a space
contained in the first string corresponds to an insertion
of the extra feature into the second string; and a space in
the second string corresponds to a deletion of the extra
feature from the first string. The insertion and deletion are
the reverse of each other. A dash(‘-’) is therefore used to
represent a space primitive inserted into the corresponding
positions in the strings for the situation of deletion. Notice
that we use “spacing” to represent the gap in the word
image, whereas we use “space” to represent the inserted
feature in the feature string. Their concepts are completely
different.
For a primitive string A of length n and a primitive string
B of length m, V (i, j) is defined to be the similarity value
of the prefixes < a1 , a2 , . . . , ai > and < b1 , b2 , . . . , bj >.
The similarity of A and B is precisely the value V (n, m).
The similarity of two strings A and B can be computed
by a dynamic programming with recurrences[32]. The base
conditions are :
½
V (i, 0) = 0
∀i, j : (2)
V (0, j) = 0
The general recurrence relation is:
for 1 ≤ i ≤ n, 1 ≤ j ≤ m:


 0

V (i − 1, j − 1) + ²(ai , bj )
V (i, j) = max (3)

 V (i − 1, j) + µ(ai , −)

V (i, j − 1) + ν(−, bj )
The zero in the above recurrence implements the
operation of restarting the recurrence, which can make
sure that the unmatched prefixes are discarded from the
computation.
 Finally, the maximum scoring is normalized to the
interval [0,1], with 1 corresponding to a perfect match:
S1 = max V (i, j)/VA∗ (n, n) (4)
∀i,j
where VA∗ (n, n) is the matching score between the string
A and itself. The maximum operation in Equation 4 and
the restarting recurrence operation in Equation 2 ensure the
ability of partial word matching.
If the normalized maximum score in Equation 4 is
greater than a predefined threshold δ, then we recognize
that one word image is matched with the other one(or its
portion).
On the other hand, the similarity of matching two whole
word images in their entirety(i.e. no partial matching is
allowed) can be represented by:
S2 = V (n, m)/min(VA∗ (n, n), VB∗ (m, m)) (5)
The problem can be evaluated systematically using
a tabular computation. In this approach, a bottom-up
approach is used to compute V (i, j). We first compute
V (i, j) for the smallest possible values for i and j, and
then compute the value of V (i, j) for increasing values
of i and j. This computation is organized with a dynamic
programming table of size (n + 1) × (m + 1). The table
holds the values of V (i, j) for the choices of i and j(see
Table 3). The values in row zero and column zero are filled
in directly from the base conditions for V (i, j). After that,
the remaining n × m sub-table is filled in one row at a time,
in the order of increasing i. Within each row, the cells are
filled in the order of increasing j.
The entire dynamic programming table for computing
the similarity between a string of length n and a string of
length m, can be obtained in O(nm) time, since only three
comparisons and arithmetic operations are needed per cell.
Table 3 illustrates the scoring table computing from the
primitive string of the word image “unhealthy” extracted
from a real document image and the word “health” whose
primitive string is generated by aggregating the characters’
primitive string tokens according to the character sequence
of the word, with the special primitive ‘&’ inserted between
two adjacent PSTs. It can be seen that the maximum
scoring achieved in the table corresponds to the matching
of character sequence “health” in the word “unhealthy”.
The match may be imprecise in the sense that certain
primitives are missing. Some adjacent characters in an
image word may touch each other due to various reasons.
This results in a lesser number of character spacing to be
detected, and hence a lesser number of spacing primitives
<&> in the primitive string. Let’s check again Table 3.
We can find a best matching track if we backtrack from the
maximum score, as shown in Table 3. Our investigation has
found that, the score in the best matching track with respect
to the spacing primitive <&> in the query word’s primitive
string decreases if its corresponding spacing primitive in
the real word is missing. To remedy this problem, the
normalized maximum scoring in Equation 4 is modified as:
Sm = (max V (i, j) + τ (Ng ))/VA∗ (n, n) (6)
∀i,j
where Ng is the number of such mismatched spacing
primitives, and τ (Ng ) = 2 × Ng in our experiments.
6. Experimental Results
6.1. System Implementation
An experimental platform has been implemented for
retrieving imaged documents in digital libraries using the
proposed word image coding scheme. In general, this
system has three main components in hardware: an ASP
web interface, an Oracle database and a win2k server, as
shown in Figure 6.
Its web interface is developed in Active Server Pages
(ASP) hosted on Microsoft Internet Information Server
(IIS) 5.0. Operations including the matching of word codes
are implemented as COM Component using Visual C++.
The index table containing information about previously
queried words is stored on an Oracle database server, while
the document images and their underlying feature code files
are stored on a sever with Windows 2000. 478 document
image files provided by the digital library of our university
are included in the test. These document images were
scanned from the past students’ theses and packed in PDF
files. Each of them contains about 100 to 200 pages.
The ASP web interface is where the user inputs his/her
queries and gets a list of retrieved documents as the output
ranked according to the occurrence frequency of the query
words in each of these documents. The system supports
AND/OR/NOT operations over the set of input query
words. In addition, the user can link to the actual document
ASP Interface
Query words
Original
Results Document Images
Oracle Database Win2k server
(Index table) (Feature Code Files)
Figure 6. System components
 un h e al th y
m u m u o m n m & d o m & c e o & o e m d & n d o d n m & y
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
d 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 1 0 2 1 2 1 0 0 0
n 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 3 2 2 1 4 3 2 1
h

d 0 2 1 2 1 0 2 1 4 3 2 1 4 3 2 1 0 0 0 0 2 1 0 2 3 2 2 3 6 5 4
& 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 3 6 5 4 3 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 1 1 3 1 2 2 1 2 5 8 7
c 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 5 4 5 4 5 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 2 3 2 2 1 1 4 7 6
e

e 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 4 3 4 5 4 7 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 2 1 1 3 6 5
o 0 0 0 0 1 3 2 1 0 3 2 5 4 4 6 9 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 2 5 4
& 0 0 0 0 0 2 2 1 0 2 2 4 4 6 5 8 11 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 4 4
o 0 0 0 0 0 2 2 2 1 1 1 4 4 5 6 7 10 13 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4
e 0 0 0 0 0 1 2 2 2 1 0 3 4 4 5 8 9 12 15 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7
a

m 0 2 1 2 1 0 3 2 4 3 2 2 5 4 4 7 8 11 14 17 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
& 0 1 1 1 1 0 2 2 3 6 5 4 4 7 6 6 7 10 15 16 19 19 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13
d 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 2 5 8 7 6 6 5 5 6 9 14 15 18 21 20 19 22 21 20 19 18 17 16
l

& 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 4 7 7 6 8 7 6 5 8 13 14 17 20 23 22 21 20 20 19 18 20 19
n 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 1 3 6 7 7 7 8 7 6 7 12 13 16 19 22 25 24 23 22 22 21 20 19
t

d 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 2 2 5 6 7 6 7 6 5 6 11 12 15 18 21 24 27 26 25 24 23 22 21
o 0 0 0 0 0 2 1 0 1 1 4 7 6 6 6 7 8 7 10 11 14 17 20 23 26 29 28 27 26 25 24
& 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 3 3 6 6 8 7 6 7 7 9 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 28 27 26 28 27
d 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 2 5 5 6 7 6 5 6 6 8 9 12 15 18 21 24 27 30 29 28 27 26
n 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 2 1 4 4 5 6 7 6 5 5 7 8 11 14 17 20 23 26 29 32 31 30 29
h

m 0 2 1 2 1 0 2 1 2 1 3 3 6 5 6 7 6 5 6 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 33 32

Table 3. Scoring table and missing gap recovery

image through the available hyperlinks over the document’s
name for online reading or download it for future reference.
The time used to process each input query is also recorded
and shown on the top of the final query result for user’s
information. Intermediate processes such as searching index
table and updating index table will be shown to notify the
user if these operations are carried out for certain set of
query input. Figure 7 demonstrates an example of the user’s
query result.
The Oracle database is used to store an index table that
contains corresponding information of all the words that
have been queried before. The information available there
for each word are the URLs of the matching document
images and the occurrence frequency of this word in each
of the corresponding documents. Moreover, the Oracle
database is also used to store a temporary result table that
records all the retrieved documents during the processing
for each particular query word. This result table is merged
with each subsequent result set and finally ends up to
be a list of documents that match the whole input query
expression. The final result is then retrieved directly from
this result table and returned to the user for display.
Finally, the win2k server is used to store a list of
feature code files generated from the original document
images. The feature code file generation step is done
through some off-line operations with noise removal and
skew rectification preprocessing procedures. These files
are stored as a database and to be used during the word
primitive codes matching step, which happens when the
query word is not found in the index table, that is, the query
word has not been queried before. In this case, we need to
convert the query word to a feature code string and perform
the word codes matching operation among the underlying
feature code files stored on the win2k server.
6.2. AND/OR/NOT Operation
The system supports AND/OR/NOT operations over a
set of query words. Users are prompted through a web
interface to input a set of query words separated by
an empty space and then choose to perform AND/OR
operation on them, then followed by a set of query words
that are not to be included in the resulting documents. The
NOT operation is performed after the AND/OR operations,
which removes those documents that contain those words
specified in the NOT query input box.
6.2.1. AND Operation Generally speaking, if the AND
operation is chosen, the system will do as follows: It starts
from the first word, processes it to obtain a result table
and stores the table temporarily in the Oracle database.
It then joins this table with the resulting record set of
each subsequent round to obtain a new result table. In
this manner, at the end of each round, the result table
will store information of the documents that contain all
the query words up to now and the multiplication of their
corresponding normalized frequencies appearing in this
document. In the end, only those documents that contain
all the specified query words will be left in the result table
for merging with the subsequent result of NOT operation.
 Figure 7. Search Result

However, in the case where no single document contains

all the query words, the search will stop right at the round Documents Occurrence Documents Occurrence
1.pdf 3.45% 2.pdf 4.67%
when either the result table or the current record set is
2.pdf 2.56% 3.pdf 3.12%
empty. Hence, no time-wasting search will be performed
3.pdf 0.12% 4.pdf 1.22%
for the subsequent words. The user will be notified that no
Result table after round 1 (“approach”) Records found for “analysis”
document is found that matches the query input expression.
Join on “Documents”
To be more specific, let’s consider the following query
example, say, an AND operation on “approach analysis Documents Occurrence
assembly technique”. Suppose there are five underlying 2.pdf 0.12%
Document Occurrence
s
5.pdf 6.48%
documents in total that we will perform our search on, 3.pdf 0.0037%
namely 1.pdf, 2.pdf, 3.pdf, 4.pdf and 5.pdf. If “approach” is Result table after round 2
Records found for “assembly”

contained in 1, 2 and 3; “analysis” is contained in 2, 3 and

Join on “Documents”
4; ”assembly” is contained in 5; “technique” is contained in
3; then Figure 8 shows the result table at the end of each Empty Table (search stops)
round and also the merging process.
Figure 8. AND Operation
As we can see from the figure, both “approach” and
“analysis” are contained in 2.pdf and 3.pdf. Therefore,
after round 2, the result table will only have two entries.
Moreover, the corresponding normalized frequency is the join them with the result table after round 2. Since the join
multiplication of the normalized frequencies that each of operation is performed on “Documents” field, there is no
these two words appears in this document. Subsequently, common file that contains all the first three words. So after
we obtain the set of documents that contain “assembly” and round 3, the result table is empty and the search will stop
 here without further search on the last word “technique”. return them back to the user for display. Figure 10 shows an
Finally, the user will be informed that no documents are example of the NOT operation.
found for the current input query.
6.2.2. OR Operation Similarly, for the OR operation, the Documents Occurrence Documents Occurrence
procedures are the same except for the merging step. In 1.pdf 3.45% 2.pdf 4.67%
this case, we will do a union instead of join. That is, 2.pdf 2.56% 3.pdf 3.12%
the new result table will contain all the documents that 3.pdf 0.12% 4.pdf 1.22%
appear either in the previous result table or in the current
Result table after round 1 (“approach”) Records found for “analysis”
record set. Moreover, the normalized frequency will be the
Remove 2.pdf, 3.pdf from
summation of the respective normalized frequencies if two result table
words both appear in the same document. Figure 9 shows
the search process for the same example above under the Documents Occurrence Documents Occurrence

“OR” operation. 1.pdf 3.45% 5.pdf 3.48%

Result table after round 2 Records found for “assembly”

Documents Occurrence Documents Occurrence Nothing is removed from

1.pdf 3.45% 2.pdf 4.67%
result table

2.pdf 2.56% 3.pdf 3.12%

Documents Occurrence
3.pdf 0.12% 4.pdf 1.22%
Result table after round 1 (“approach”) Records found for “analysis” 1.pdf 3.45%

Union on “Documents”

Figure 10. NOT Operation

Documents Occurrence
1.pdf 3.45% Documents Occurrence
2.pdf 7.23% 5.pdf 6.48%
3.pdf 3.24% Records found for “assembly”
4.pdf 1.22%

Result table after round 2 Union on “Documents”

Documents
1.pdf
2.pdf
3.pdf
4.pdf
5.pdf
Result table after round 3
Figure 9. OR Operation
6.2.3. NOT Operation The NOT operation is carried out
after the AND/OR operations. In particular, after AND/OR
operations, we will get a list of matching documents stored
in a temporary result table. If the result table is not empty
and there are some more query words in the NOT input
box, we will go on processing each of these words and
remove those common documents that contain these words
not to be included. Finally, the result table will contain all
those documents that satisfy the user’s input query. We can
then directly retrieve those corresponding information and
6.3. Speed
Occurrence For the efficiency measure, the elapsed time since
3.45%
Documents Occurrence
the user specifies the query words until he/she gets the
7.23%
3.pdf 3.52% displayed results has been tested and shown on the top of
3.24%
1.22%
Records found for “technique” each query result. There are two scenarios that we need to
3.48% consider. One is when all the input query words have been
Union on “Documents” queried before, so the word information is already stored
Documents Occurrence
in the index table. In this case, the time to process these
1.pdf 3.45% words is merely to retrieve several entries from the Oracle
2.pdf 7.23% database and therefore trivial (usually less than 0.1 second
3.pdf 6.76% for each word). An example of this scenario is shown in
4.pdf 1.22%
Figure 7. Here, an OR operation is performed between
5.pdf 3.48%
“simulation algorithm”, followed by the NOT operation on
Result table after round 4
“computational approach”. The final result gives all the
documents that contain either “simulation” or “algorithm””,
but do not contain “computational” and “approach”. Since
all the words specified here are queried before, the time
needed is only to search the index table and combine the
results. In this case, it is 0.34375 second.
The other scenario is when some of the query words do
not exist in the index table. In this case, we need to perform
feature code matching in those underlying feature code
files for each of them. If there are newly found matches,
the system will update the index table and keep the user
informed as well. This is usually time consuming since for
each word we have to search every underlying file in order
to find the matches. The result shows that the time needed
for this scenario is relatively longer. An example of this
 Figure 11. Another example
scenario is shown in Figure 11, where an AND operation
is first performed between “computational approach”, then
followed by the NOT operation on “Poincare”. Since
“Poincare” was not queried before, we need to perform
partial word matching among the feature code files. As a
result, one document is found containing “Poincare” and
inserted to the index table as it is shown in the interface. In
this case, the time needed is longer than retrieving directly
from the index table, which is 22.375 seconds.
Therefore, the advantage of our system is that it is
an incremental intelligence system, i.e., as more users
come to use this system, only searching the index table
will probably fulfill the user’s request, hence achieve an
impressive efficiency.
7. Conclusions and Future Work
Information retrieval in imaged documents is in urgent
need for digital libraries. In this paper, a word image coding
technique is proposed for designing an information retrieval
system with ability of dealing with imaged documents
stored in digital libraries. An experimental platform has
been implemented, and the preliminary test results with the
imaged documents of students’ theses in our digital library
show that the proposed system provides an efficient and
promising tool for document image retrieval.
Future work will focus on improving the experimental
system to achieve a practical usage. The setting of matching
scoring between different primitive codes is left to future
research. How to integrate linguistical knowledge to the
present system to improve the retrieval performance will
need further investigation in future. Especially, all of the
word objects are included in the feature coding file in the
present system, which obviously slows down the processing
speed. If some meaningful keywords are extracted from
them, and are used to generate the feature coding file, not
only the processing will speed up greatly, but also retrieval
performance benefits from this.
Acknowledgements
This research is jointly supported by the Agency
for Science, Technology and Research, and Ministry
of Education of Singapore under research grant
R-252-000-071-112/303.
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