Beyond Search Applications of Probabilistic Indexing

PrIx development was originally driven by the need of searching for textual information in large collections of untranscribed text images. The spots that result from the PrIx process are not image transcripts, but they provide very rich probabilistic information about the text rendered in the images and image regions or locations. This chapter presents approaches to exploit this information to go beyond information search applications. Specifically, we will present methods to use the PrIx of an image or an image collection to deal with tasks that traditionally require actual textual data such as electronic text.We will cover, in order, basic and advanced text analytics, statistical information extraction and document image classification by textual content.