NLP Based Mathematical Descriptor

Reading of mathematical expression or equation in the document images is very challenging due to the large variability of mathematical symbols and expressions. Here, we pose reading of mathematical equation as a task of generation of the textual description which interprets the internal meaning of this equation. Inspired by the natural image captioning problem in computer vision, we present a mathematical equation description (MED) model, a novel end-to-end trainable deep neural network-based approach that learns to generate a textual description for reading mathematical equation images. Our MED model consists of a convolution neural network as an encoder that extracts features of input mathematical equation images and a recurrent neural network with attention mechanism which generates description related to the input mathematical equation images.