Method and system for extracting information from a document

• US 7,142,728 B2
• Filed: 05/17/2002
• Issued: 11/28/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 05/17/2002
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: Leidos, Inc. (Leidos Holdings, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Science Applications International Corporation
• Inventors: Wnek, Janusz
• Primary Examiner(s): Mancuso, Joseph
• Assistant Examiner(s): Akhavannik, Hadi
• Application Number:
  US10/146,959
• Publication Number:
  US 20030215137A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,656 Days
• Field of Search: 382/181, 382/294, 382/290, 382/173
• US Class Current: 382/294
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 30/416 Extracting the logical structure, e.g. chapters, sections or page numbers; Identifying elements of the document, e.g. authors

Abstract

A computer-implemented method for extracting information from a population of subject documents. The method includes modeling a document structure. The modeled document structure includes at least a document component hierarchy with at least one record type. Each record type includes at least one record part type and at least one record part type comprising at least one data element type. For a subject document exhibiting at least a portion of the modeled document structure, preferred embodiments of the invention identifying data of a type corresponding to at least one modeled data element type. Identified subject document data is then associated with the corresponding modeled data element type.

Claims

1. A method for horizontally aligning a first region of a document with a second region of a document, each region characterized by a plurality of sub-regions, the method comprising:

determining a type for each of a plurality of sub-regions in each region;

determining an edit distance for each typed first region sub-region, typed second region sub-region pair;

determining a first region sub-region offset for those pairs characterized by an edit distance not greater than a threshold;

determining a first region offset as a function of the first region sub-region offsets

offsetting the first region by the offset, wherein

determining a first region offset as a function of the first region sub-region offsets comprises calculating the average offset between the largest cluster of similar offsets.

2. The method as in claim 1, wherein

each region comprises a page,

each sub-region comprises a line.

3. The method as in claim 1, wherein

determining a type for each of a plurality of sub-regions in each region comprises generalizing each sub-region.