Optical character recognition for typeset mathematics

There is a wealth of mathematical knowledge that could be potentially very useful in many computational applications, but is not available in electronic form. This knowledge comes in the form of mechanically typeset books and journals going back more than a hundred years. Besides these older sources, there are a great many current publications, filled with useful mathematical information, which are difficult if not impossible to obtain in electronic form. What we would like to do is extract character information from these documents, which could then be passed to higher-level parsing routines for further extraction of mathematical content (or any other useful 2-dimensional semantic content). Unfortunately, current commercial OCR (optical character recognition) software packages are quite unable to handle mathematical formulas, since their algorithms at all levels use heuristics developed for other document styles. We are concerned with the development of OCR methods that m-e able to handle this specialized task of mathematical expression recognition.