Survey of Structural Analysis in Mathematical Expression Recognition

Automated identification of mathematical expressions (MEs) is essential in transforming scientific and engineering documents into electronic form. Even though character and symbol recognizers have achieved commendable performance for digitizing documents, structure analysers still face a challenge in correctly interpreting the maths expressions. This review paper compares the salient aspects of past works dealing with structure analysis of printed and handwritten MEs. To the best of our knowledge, no previous work has done a systematic study of structural analysis methods in mathematical expression recognition. We present distinguishing aspects of different grammars and their production rules for semantic parsing of ME. Our study contributes by providing information on the existing datasets, their desirable properties, different evaluation measures, distinguishing aspects of techniques used and future research directions in structural analysis.