ICDAR 2013 Competition on Book Structure Extraction

Abstract

This paper summarizes the 3rd Book Structure Extraction competition that was run at the ICDAR 2013. Its goal is to evaluate and compare automatic techniques for deriving structure information from digitized books, which could then be used to aid navigation inside the books. More specifically, the task that participants are faced with is to construct hyperlinked tables of contents for a collection of 1,000 digitized books. This paper reviews the setup of the competition, the book collection used in the task, and the measures used for the evaluation. The main novelty of the 2013 competition is that we were able to rely on an external provider for the ground truthing phase, hence granting the consistency of the evaluation. In addition, this permitted to nearly double the number of annotated books from the 1,040 books annotated in 2009 and 2011 to over 2,000 books. The paper further presents the result performance of the 6 participating research teams, and briefly summarizes their approaches.

Automatic Table-of-Contents Generation for Efficient Information Access

“…Recent algorithms have explored TOC extraction by parsing TOC pages and extract the hierarchical structure of sections and subsections. Most methods in this area have been developed in the context of the INEX [20] and ICDAR competitions [21][22][23] which, as we have mentioned before, focus on long and old digitised historical books, as opposed to short scientific articles with previous methods. To the best of our knowledge, the only work led outside these competitions on the topic of TOC page parsing is [24,25], who apply a rule-based approach to PDF document layout analysis.…”

“…Lastly, a number of methods have been proposed to detect titles using machine learning methods based on layout and text features. In such approaches, the list of titles are hierarchically ordered according to a predefined rule-based function [21,26,27].…”

Enhancing Table of Contents Extraction by System Aggregation

“…Several approaches are meant to address the extraction of books' ToCs. They can be classified into 3 types, including approaches based on the detection of ToC pages, on the whole book content, and hybrid ones [4].…”

“…In this paper, we present an approach based on the aggregation of the existing approaches. We utilise the combination of two set operators (the union and the intersection) and two properties (title and page number) to aggregate submissions of the ICDAR book structure extraction competitions in 2009 [2], 2011 [3], and 2013 [4]. Our method is evaluated by the title-based and link-based measures over three book structure extraction competitions' datasets.…”

Report on INEX 2013

“…In addition to these task, the Structure Extraction (SE) task ran at ICDAR 2013 [3], with the aim of evaluating automatic techniques for deriving structure from OCR and building hyperlinked table of contents. The extracted structure could then be used to aid navigation inside the books.…”