On the reading of tables of contents

This paper presents a framework for understanding tables of contents of books, journals, and magazines. We propose a universal logical structure representation in terms of a hierarchy of entries, each of which may contain a descriptor and a locator. We enumerate graphical and perceptual cues that provide cues to parsing of tables of contents in terms of this formalism. We make initial suggestions about the form of evaluation metrics for comparing groundtruthed tables of contents with the output of recognition algorithms... Finally we discuss implications of our observations on the design of recognition algorithms.