A visual query by example system for digital documents

The decreasing cost and the increasing availability of new technologies is enabling people to create their own digital libraries. One of the main topic in personal digital libraries is allowing people to select interesting information among all the different digital formats available today (pdf, html, tiff,...). Moreover the advantage of keeping these libraries available on-line is raising the demand for converting paper documents into digital documents. These motivations drove us to design a new system which could enable the user to interact and query documents independently from the digital formats in which they are represented. In order to achieve this independence from the format we consider all the digital documents contained in a digital library as images. Our system tries to automatically detect the layout of the digital documents and recognize the geometric regions of interest in order to allow the user to query his digital library by visual content. © 2003 IEEE.