A Linear Grammar Approach to Mathematical Formula Recognition from PDF

Abstract

Many approaches have been proposed over the years for the recognition of mathematical formulae from scanned documents. More recently a need has arisen to recognise formulae from PDF documents. Here we can avoid ambiguities introduced by traditional OCR approaches and instead extract perfect knowledge of the characters used in formulae directly from the document. This can be exploited by formula recognition techniques to achieve correct results and high performance. In this paper we revisit an old grammatical approach to formula recognition, that of Anderson from 1968, and assess its applicability with respect to data extracted from PDF documents. We identify some problems of the original method when applied to common mathematical expressions and show how they can be overcome. The simplicity of the original method leads to a very efficient recognition technique that not only is very simple to implement but also yields results of high accuracy for the recognition of mathematical formulae from PDF documents.