nent among these are: accurate recognition of degraded docu-
ments and identification of words and phrases signifying peo-
Pulling out secrets:
New technologies help
military find intelligence in
degraded documents
By Dr. Steven Schlosser
Recent research has produced practical multilingual text proc-
essing systems that are assisting today’s war fighters.
Modern war fighting emphasizes the development of intelli-
gence to obtain strategic and tactical advantage. Recent tech-
nological advances have broadened and accelerated this trend
enormously and, today, it is finally practical to make use of
captured paper documents for intelligence purposes while still
on the battlefield.
Today’s soldiers need to determine the gist of paper documents
that are in poor condition, hard to read, and written in a for-
eign language – immediately. Because soldier-linguists are in
very short supply, it is a challenge to quickly assess a docu-
ment’s intelligence relevance and obtain actionable informa-
tion from it to support the war fighter.
An emerging solution to the challenge of battlefield document
exploitation employs field-based systems that integrate ad-
vanced forms of document image capture, multilingual Optical
Character Recognition (OCR), multilingual machine transla-
tion, and multilingual word or phrase spotting. Of particular
interest are the recent developments in multilingual OCR and
multilingual word spotting that make field-based exploitation
systems practical.
The current military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan under-
score the need for OCR systems that effectively transcribe
Middle Eastern and Asian languages. While OCR software for
Latin languages has long existed, systems that can recognize
languages such as Arabic, Persian, Pashto, and Urdu as well as
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are just emerging. Recently
developed multilingual OCR systems address these military-
significant languages and have a number of unusual capabili-
ties that directly fulfill the needs of battlefield systems. Promi-
ple, places, or things.
Multilingual Text Transcription and Word Spotting
Accurate transcription of Middle Eastern and Asian text is
difficult. Degraded document images must be enhanced before
accurate recognition is possible. Figure 1 displays an example
of the extent to which images can be enhanced and readable
information recovered. Since degraded document images are
the norm in battlefield situations, the integration of sophisti-
cated enhancement capabilities with a recognition system
makes military document exploitation much more successful.
Another key to accurate recognition of degraded documents
lies in the recognition process itself. One superior method uses
the concept of “over-segmentation,” which overcomes many
of the limitations of traditional character segmentation when
working with low-resolution imagery or connected scripts (for
example, Arabic). The goal of over-segmentation is to split, or
segment, an image of text into primitives: pieces containing an
individual character or a portion of a character. Then the task
of correctly assembling the primitives into recognized charac-
ters can be performed and language-specific constraints incor-
porated to achieve maximum accuracy regardless of whether
the source document is degraded, cursive, or even handwritten.
Before After
FIGURE 1 Before – After: NovoDynamics software ex-
tracts information from degraded documents, to help
military analysts pull valuable information from more
sources.
High word-spotting accuracy is obtained through the use of
query-time OCR. A typical general-purpose OCR lexicon is
designed to cover the most frequently used words in the target
language to maximize recognition performance without mak-
ing any assumptions about document content. While this strat-
egy provides the best generic recognition, it is not ideal for
word spotting, or equivalently, search queries, because queries
against a document (or a corpus) are almost always concerned
with less frequent words representing entities such as people,
places, or things. Since these types of words occur only in
specialized contexts, they are not usually included in a
general-purpose lexicon. Consequently, they are more likely to
be incorrectly recognized by a generic OCR engine, particu-
larly in the case of low-quality document imagery where
word-spotting accuracies are significantly decreased.
Query-time OCR is implemented by constructing a supple-
mental lexicon from the keywords of each query and providing
it to the OCR when word spotting is performed. Though not
obvious, query-time OCR turns out to be a very practical ap-
proach to word spotting that results in accuracy improvements
of up to 15% compared to conventional methods.

Practical Tools for Document Exploitation

The ascent of dissimilar enemies calls for new tools for the
war fighter that address the need to obtain relevant intelligence
information from degraded foreign language documents while
on the battlefield. Modern document exploitation systems aim
to provide that support by integrating software components
that enable image capture, transcription, translation, and
search (word spotting). VERUS, a product of NovoDynamics
Inc., incorporates the OCR advances described for multilin-
gual recognition of degraded Middle Eastern and Asian lan-
guage documents. The aforementioned query-time OCR mod-
ule has been proven in a laboratory setting and can be inte-
grated with VERUS when needed. The result: highly accurate,
rapid readings of degraded documents, to help the military find
actionable intelligence.

Dr. Steven Schlosser is senior scientist at NovoDynamics,

Inc., an In-Q-Tel portfolio company headquartered in Ann
Arbor, MI with offices in Vienna, VA. He holds a Ph.D. in
Mathematics from SUNY at Buffalo and a B.S. in Physics from
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He can be contacted at
steve@novodynamics.com.

NovoDynamics, Inc.
Tel: 734.205.9126
www.novodynamics.com