Abstract: This paper deals with automatic detection of seal (stamp) from documents with cluttered background. Seal detection involves a difficult challenge due to its multi-oriented nature, arbitrary shape, overlapping of its part with signature, noise, etc. Here, a seal object is characterized by scale and rotation invariant spatial feature descriptors computed from recognition result of individual connected components (characters). Scale and rotation invariant features are used in a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to recognize multi-scale and multi-oriented text characters. The concept of generalized Hough transform (GHT) is used to detect the seal and a voting scheme is designed for finding possible location of the seal in a document based on the spatial feature descriptor of neighboring component pairs. The peak of votes in GHT accumulator validates the hypothesis to locate the seal in a document. Experiment is performed in an archive of historical documents of handwritten/printed English text. Experimental results show that the method is robust in locating seal instances of arbitrary shape and orientation in documents, and also efficient in indexing a collection of documents for retrieval purposes.

Abstract: Graph-based methods are known to be successful in many machine learning and pattern classification tasks. These methods consider semi-structured data as graphs where nodes correspond to primitives (parts, interest points, segments,
etc.) and edges characterize the relationships between these primitives. However, these non-vectorial graph data cannot be straightforwardly plugged into off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms without a preliminary step of – explicit/implicit –graph vectorization and embedding. This embedding process
should be resilient to intra-class graph variations while being highly discriminant. In this paper, we propose a novel high-order stochastic graphlet embedding (SGE) that maps graphs into vector spaces. Our main contribution includes a new stochastic search procedure that efficiently parses a given graph and extracts/samples unlimitedly high-order graphlets. We consider
these graphlets, with increasing orders, to model local primitives as well as their increasingly complex interactions. In order to build our graph representation, we measure the distribution of these graphlets into a given graph, using particular hash functions that efficiently assign sampled graphlets into isomorphic sets with a very low probability of collision. When
combined with maximum margin classifiers, these graphlet-based representations have positive impact on the performance of pattern comparison and recognition as corroborated through extensive experiments using standard benchmark databases.