Measuring Structural Similarity of Document Pages for Searching Document Image Databases

Current document management and database systems provide text search and retrieval capabilities, but generally lack the ability to utilize the documents’ logical and physical structures. This paper describes a general system for document image retrieval that is able to make use of document structure. It discusses the use of structural similarity for retrieval; it defines a measure of structural similarity between document images based on content area overlap, and also compares similarity ratings based on this measure with human relevance judgments.