Document image decoding in the Berkeley Digital Library

The UC Berkeley Environmental Digital Library Project is one of six university led projects that were initiated in the fall of 1994 as part of a four year digital library initiative sponsored by the NSF, NASA and ARPA. The Berkeley project is particularly interesting from an image processing perspective because its testbed collection consists almost entirely of scanned materials. As a result, the Berkeley project is making extensive use of document recognition and other image analysis technology to provide content based access to the collection. The Document Image Decoding (DID) group at Xerox PARC is a member of the Berkeley team and is investigating the application of DID techniques to providing high quality (accurate and properly structured) transcriptions of scanned documents. The paper briefly describes the Berkeley project, discusses some of its recognition requirements and presents an example of an advanced structured document created using DID technology.