Searching documentation using text, OCR, and image

Tom Yeh, Boris Katz

Abstract: We describe a mixed-modality method to index and search software documentation in three ways: plain text, OCR text of embedded figures, and visual features of these figures. Using a corpus of 102 computer books with a total of 62,943 pages and 75,800 figures, we empirically demonstrate that our method achieves better precision/recall than do alternatives based on single modalities.