In a change from the usual blog posts, today we have a guest blog post from a Researcher, the author has 15+ years of experience in Java Programming, and has worked in many research labs in France and in the United States.
Many Thanks to the author for taking time out to share why JPedal is important in the research the author is doing.
Humans are very efficient at “making sense” of what they perceive. While we do not think much about that, we are each and every second matching our continuous stream of perceptions with learned patterns, and use them to “understand” our surroundings. Once this skill is learned, it quickly becomes subconscious and automatic.
Hence, when you’re seen a text somewhere (assuming it is written with letters you are used to), you will automatically read it and make sense of it.
While it seems only natural to you, it is actually quite a magnificent process that goes on without you even noticing any more.
Seeking the mechanisms behind the “understanding” process is the main goal of our research project. The problem was centered on the study of visual perceptions and especially the use of spatial clues to make “sense” of how a formatted text-based document is constructed. In other words, find out how do we understand the layout of a page and use it to know what is what (title, paragraph, images, and so on) and in which order do they organize (where should I start reading? What can I skip? …).
To do so, we are using a wide set of PDF documents that should be reduce to the simplest perception schema: an image with “dots” of colors. And this is where IDRSolutions’ Jpedal Java PDF Library comes to help.
With this library we aim at converting any PDF source into a stream of fine “perceptions” for our computer to “understand”.
While this operation could seem simple it is very important to be able to convert documents from a wide range of origins, hence using different standards and PDF flavors. It is also really important that the rendered document contains accurately whatever is in the PDF file.
JPedal seems to be trustworthy of these two important constraints.
It is as essential to our software as our “eyes” are to us.
Would you like to achieve similar results?
If you would like a free session to talk about how we can help you, book a Zoom call with us.
