Chemical Structure Recognition: A Rule Based Approach

In chemical literature much information is given in the form of diagrams depicting molecules. In order to access this information diagrams have to be recognised and translated into a processable format. We present an approach that models the principal recognition steps for molecule diagrams in a strictly rule based system, providing rules to identify the main components - atoms and bonds - as well as to resolve possible ambiguities. The result of the process is a translation into a graph representation that can be used for further processing. We show the effectiveness of our approach by describing its embedding into a full recognition system and present an experimental evaluation that demonstrates how our current implementation outperforms the leading open source system currently available.