Segmenting Compound Biomedical Figures into Their Constituent Panels.

Many of the figures in biomedical publications are compound figures consisting of multiple panels. Segmenting such figures into constituent panels is an essential first step for harvesting the visual information within the biomedical documents. Current figure separation methods are based primarily on gap-detection and suffer from over- and under-segmentation. In this paper, we propose a new compound figure segmentation scheme based on Connected Component Analysis. To overcome shortcomings typically manifested by existing methods, we develop a quality assessment step for evaluating and modifying segmentations. Two methods are proposed to re-segment the images if the initial segmentations are inaccurate. Experiments and results comparing the performance of our method to that of other top methods demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.