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Text information in scanned documents becomes accessible only when extracted and interpreted by a text recognizer. For a recognizer to work successfully, it must have detailed location information about the regions of the document images that it is asked to analyse. It will need focus on page regions with text skipping non-text regions that include illustrations or photographs. However, text recognizers do not work as logical analyzers. Logical layout analysis automatically determines the function of a document text region, that is, it labels each region as a title, paragraph, or caption, and so on, and thus is an essential part of a document understanding system. In the past, rule-based algorithms have been used to conduct logical layout analysis, using limited size data sets. We here instead focus on supervised learning methods for logical layout analysis. We describe LABA, a system based on multiple support vector machines to perform logical Layout Analysis of scanned Books pages in Arabic. The system detects the function of a text region based on the analysis of various images features and a voting mechanism. For a baseline comparison, we implemented an older but state-of-the-art neural network method. We evaluated LABA using a data set of scanned pages from illustrated Arabic books and obtained high recall and precision values. We also found that the F-measure of LABA is higher for five of the tested six classes compared to the state-of-the-art method. 

Datasets of documents in Arabic are urgently needed to promote computer vision and natural language processing research that addresses the specifics of the language. Unfortunately, publicly available Arabic datasets are limited in size and restricted to certain document domains. This paper presents the release of BE-Arabic-9K, a dataset of more than 9000 high-quality scanned images from over 700 Arabic books. Among these, 1500 images have been manually segmented into regions and labeled by their functionality. BE-Arabic-9K includes book pages with a wide variety of complex layouts and page contents, making it suitable for various document layout analysis and text recognition research tasks. The paper also presents a page layout segmentation and text extraction baseline model based on fine-tuned Faster R-CNN structure (FFRA). This baseline model yields cross-validation results with an average accuracy of 99.4% and F1 score of 99.1% for text versus non-text block classification on 1500 annotated images of BE-Arabic-9K. These results are remarkably better than those of the state-of-the-art Arabic book page segmentation system ECDP. FFRA also outperforms three other prior systems when tested on a competition benchmark dataset, making it an outstanding baseline model to challenge.