Abstract
Emphasis of thsi study is put on developing an automatic approach to identifying a given unknown technical journal from its cover page. Since journal's cover pages contain a great deal of information, determining the title of an unknown journal using optical character recognition techniques seems difficult. Using the layout structure of text blocks on the journal's cover page is an effective method for distinguishing one journal from the others. In order to achieve efficient layout-structure comparison, a hidden Markov model (HMM) is used to represent the layout structure of text blocks for each kind of journal. Accordingly, title determination of the unknown journal to each HMM in the database. Besides, from the layout structure of the best matched HMM, we can locate the text blocks of the title, issue date, and contents of the given journal (if they are on the journal's cover page), which will be processed in the future for accomplishing an automatic journal-contents recognition system. Experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed approach.