Developed by Prerana Jana(prerana.jana@gmail.com), Anubhab Majumdar(anubhabmajumdar93@gmail.com).

PDF format of scanned document images is not searchable. OCR tries to remedy this adversity by converting document images into editable and searchable data, but it has its own limitations in presence of equations - both mathematical and chemical. OCR system for mathematical equation is already a major research area and has provided success- ful result. However, chemical equation segmentation has been a less ventured road. In this paper, we present a novel method for automated generation of searchable PDF format of segmented chemical equations from scanned doc- ument images by performing chemical symbol recognition and auto-correction of OCR output. We use existing OCR system, pattern recognition technique, contextual data anal- ysis and a standard LATEX package to generate the chemical equation in searchable PDF format. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through exhaustive testing on 234 document images.

PUBLISHED IN ACM SYMPOSIUM ON DOCUMENT ENGINEERING (DocEng 2016)