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JAIT 2025 Vol.16(7): 980-989
doi: 10.12720/jait.16.7.980-989

Retrieving Math Information Based on Equation Detection and Recognition within Digital Images

Angel Wheelwright and Yiu-Kai Ng *
Computer Science Department, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA
Email: angelwhwrt@gmail.com (A.W.); ng@compsci.byu.edu (Y.-K.N.)
*Corresponding author

Manuscript received February 22, 2025; revised April 2, 2025; accepted April 23, 2025; published July 15, 2025.

Abstract—In the USA, math proficiency levels these days are lower than ever before, which is problematic, since math is commonly used throughout life and math enables people to better solve problems, understand patterns, quantify relationships, and make predictions of the future. While Math Information Retrieval (MIR) as an area of study is relatively new, it is essential and provides a means to search for relevant sources of math information to those who are studying math, something which is difficult to do for people without prior knowledge of a specific math subject area they are looking for. In order to develop a robust MIR system, designers must be able to process Math Equations (MEs) to a format that the system can use, which is difficult due to various formats math information are stored in, including visual images and document texts. In solving this problem, we propose a ME extraction system that (i) applies a one shot object detector to identify math equations in digital images using an efficient neural architecture search method and (ii) employs a Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) encoder-decoder system to recognize math equation symbols based on the Bayesian Neural Network (BNN) row encoding. The proposed system balances speed and accuracy of a Math Information Retrieval (IR) system.
 
Keywords—image detection, image recognition, math questions, math answers

Cite: Angel Wheelwright and Yiu-Kai Ng, "Retrieving Math Information Based on Equation Detection and Recognition within Digital Images," Journal of Advances in Information Technology, Vol. 16, No. 7, pp. 980-989, 2025. doi: 10.12720/jait.16.7.980-989

Copyright © 2025 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).

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