CLiDE: Chemical Literature Data Extraction

Overview

CLiDE, an acronym for Chemical Literature Data Extraction, is a document image processing software, which extracts content of printed chemistry documents. The aim of CLiDE is to process whole pages of scanned chemical documents or whole PDF documents, and to extract the maximum amount of information from both the text and the graphic regions. The extracted information can be stored in ChemDraw or MOL file format.

Depictions of 2D chemical structures published in the literature are stored as bitmap images in most electronic sources of chemical information such as patents, journals and reports. Although the original chemical structures are usually created using chemical drawing programs which generate complete structural information, this information is lost during the publication process and if required, is normally regenerated by redrawing the structure with a computer program, which is time-consuming and prone to errors.

CLiDE Pro is a chemical OCR software tool aimed at automatic extraction of chemical information from either the printed chemistry literature, or from the equivalent electronic PDF version. CLiDE Pro is the latest incarnation of software to emerge from the long-term CLiDE (Chemical Literature Data Extraction) project.