Computing and Informatics

The emphasis of this study is put on developing an automatic approach to identifying a given unknown technical journal from its cover page. Since journal's cover pages contain a great deal of information, determining the title of an unknown journal using optical character recognition techniques seems difficult. Comparing the layout structures of text blocks on the journals' cover pages is an effective method for distinguishing one journal from the other. In order to achieve efficient layout-structure comparison, a left-to-right hidden Markov model (HMM) is used to represent the layout structure of text blocks for each kind of journal. Accordingly, title determination of an input unknown journal can be effectively achieved by comparing the layout structure of the unknown journal to each HMM in the database. Besides, from the layout structure of the best matched HMM, we can locate the text block of the issue date, which will be recognized by OCR techniques for accomplishing an automatic journal registration system. Experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed approach.