Maurizio Rigamonti

Towards a canonical and structured representation of PDF documents through reverse engineering

This article presents Xed, a reverse engineering tool for PDF documents, which extracts the original document layout structure. Xed mixes electronic extraction methods with state-of-the-art document analysis techniques and outputs the layout structure in a hierarchical canonical form, i.e. which is universal and independent of the document type. This article first reviews the major traps and tricks of the PDF format. It then introduces the architecture of Xed along with its main modules, and, in particular, the document physical structure extraction algorithm. Later on, a canonical format is proposed and discussed with an example. Finally the results of a practical evaluation are presented, followed by an outline of future works on the logical structure extraction.

XCDF: a canonical and structured document format

Accessing the structured content of PDF document is a difficult task, requiring pre-processing and reverse engineering techniques. In this paper, we first present different methods to accomplish this task, which are based either on document image analysis, or on electronic content extraction. Then, XCDF, a canonical format with well-defined properties is proposed as a suitable solution for representing structured electronic documents and as an entry point for further researches and works. The system and methods used for reverse engineering PDF document into this canonical format are also presented. We finally present current applications of this work into various domains, spacing from data mining to multimedia navigation, and consistently benefiting from our canonical format in order to access PDF document content and structures.

Extended excentric labeling

The paper presents an extension to the Excentric Labeling, a labeling technique to dynamically show labels around a movable lens. Each labels refers to one object within the lens and is connected to it through a line. The original implementation has several known limitations and potential improvements that we address in this work, like: high density areas, uneven density distributions, and summary statistics. We describe the implemented extensions and present a think‐aloud user study. The study shows that users can naturally understand and easily operate the majority of the implemented function but label scrolling, which requires additional research. From the study we also gained unanticipated requirements and interesting directions for further research.

DocMining: A Cooperative Platform for Heterogeneous Document Interpretation According to User-Defined Scenarios

The DocMining platform is aimed at providing a general framework for document interpretation. It integrates document processing units coming from different sources and communicating through the document being interpreted. A task to be performed is represented by a scenario that describes the units to be run, and each unit is associated with a contract that describes the parameters, data and results of the unit as well as the way to run it. A controller interprets the scenario and triggers each required document processing unit at its turn. Documents, scenarios and contracts are all represented in XML, to make data manipulation and communications easier.

Browsing multimedia archives through intra- and multimodal cross-documents links

This article proposes to consider all the links existing between documents, as a new artifact for browsing through multimedia archives. In particular, links between static documents and other media are presented in this article through Inquisitor, FriDoc and FaericWorld, i.e. three distinct document-centric systems, which allow (a) browsing (b) validation of annotations, and (c) edition of annotations or documents. Inquisitor illustrates the intra-document links between a raw document and its abstract representations. It is the base level, i.e. the closest to the raw media. FriDoc illustrates the cross-documents links, in particular temporal ones, between documents at the event level, which strictly connect documents captured at the same occasion (e.g. a meeting, a conference, etc.). Finally, FaericWorid proposes cross-documents linking as a novel artifact for browsing and searching through a cross-event multimedia library. This article describes those three systemvs and the various types of links that can be built between documents. Finally, the paper presents the result of a user evaluation of FriDoc and briefly discusses the usefulness of cross-documents linking, and in particular document alignments, for browsing through multimedia archives.

DocMining: A Document analysis system builder

In this paper, we present DocMining, a general framework that allows the construction of scenarios dedicated to document image processing. The framework is the result of the collaboration between four academic partners and one industrial partner. The main issues of DocMining are the description and the execution of document analysis scenarios. The explicit declaration of scenarios and the plug-ins oriented approach of the framework allow to integrate easily new Document Processing Units and to create new application prototypes. Moreover, this paper highlights the interest of the platform to solve the problem of performance evaluation.