Recursive X-Y cut using bounding boxes of connected components

A top-down page segmentation technique known as the recursive X-Y cut decomposes a document image recursively into a set of rectangular blocks. This paper proposes that the recursive X-Y cut be implemented using bounding boxes of connected components of black pixels instead of using image pixels. The advantage is that great improvement can be achieved in computation. In fact, once bounding boxes of connected components are obtained, the recursive X-Y cut is completed within an order of a second on Sparc-10 workstations for letter-sized document images scanned at 900 dpi resolution.