Extraction of newspaper headlines from microfilm for automatic indexing

Abstract

This paper proposes a document image analysis system that extracts newspaper headlines from microfilm images with a view to providing automatic indexing for news articles in microfilm. A major challenge in achieving this is the poor image quality of microfilm as most images are usually inadequately illuminated and considerably dirty. To overcome the problem we propose a new effective method for separating characters from noisy background since conventional threshold selection techniques are inadequate to deal with this kind of image. A run length smoothing algorithm is then applied to the headline extraction. Experimental results confirm the validity of the approach. © Springer-Verlag 2004.