Word Searching in Document Images Using Word Portion Matching

An approach with the capability of searching a word portion in document images is proposed in this paper, to facilitate the detection and location of the user-specified query words. A feature string is synthesized according to the character sequence in the user-specified word, and each word image extracted from documents are represented by a feature string. Then, an inexact string matching technology is utilized to measure the similarity between the two feature strings, based on which we can estimate how the document word image is relevant to the user-specified word and decide whether its portion is the same as the user-specified word. Experimental results on real document images show that it is a promising approach, which is capable of detecting and locating the document words that entirely match or partially match with the user-specified word.