Guidelines for creating a rule-based knowledge learning system and their application to a Chinese business card layout analysis

Rule selection has long been a problem of great challenge that has to be solved when developing a rule-based knowledge learning system. Many methods have been proposed to evaluate the eligibility of a single rule based on some criteria. However, in a knowledge learning system there is usually a set of rules. These rules are not independent, but interactive. They tend to affect each other and form a rulesystem. In such case, it is no longer reasonable to isolate each rule from others for evaluation. A best rule according to certain criterion is not always the best one for the whole system. Furthermore, the data in the real world from which people want to create their learning system are often ill-defined and inconsistent. In this case, the completeness and consistency criteria for rule selection are no longer essential. In this paper, some ideas about how to solve the rule-selection problem in a systematic way are proposed. These ideas have been applied in the design of a Chinese business card layout analysis system and gained a good result on the training data set of 425 images. The implementation of the system and the result are presented in this paper.