Abstract: Most document analysis applications rely on the extraction of shape descriptors, which may be grouped into different categories, each category having its own advantages and drawbacks (O.R. Terrades et al. in Proceedings of ICDAR’07, pp. 227–231, 2007). In order to improve the richness of their description, many authors choose to combine multiple descriptors. Yet, most of the authors who propose a new descriptor content themselves with comparing its performance to the performance of a set of single state-of-the-art descriptors in a specific applicative context (e.g. symbol recognition, symbol spotting...). This results in a proliferation of the shape descriptors proposed in the literature. In this article, we propose an innovative protocol, the originality of which is to be as independent of the final application as possible and which relies on new quantitative and qualitative measures. We introduce two types of measures: while the measures of the first type are intended to characterize the descriptive power (in terms of uniqueness, distinctiveness and robustness towards noise) of a descriptor, the second type of measures characterizes the complementarity between multiple descriptors. Characterizing upstream the complementarity of shape descriptors is an alternative to the usual approach where the descriptors to be combined are selected by trial and error, considering the performance characteristics of the overall system. To illustrate the contribution of this protocol, we performed experimental studies using a set of descriptors and a set of symbols which are widely used by the community namely ART and SC descriptors and the GREC 2003 database.

Abstract: This paper presents a symbol spotting approach for indexing by content a database of line-drawing images. As line-drawings are digital-born documents designed by vectorial softwares, instead of using a pixel-based approach, we present a spotting method based on vector primitives. Graphical symbols are represented by a set of vectorial primitives which are described by an off-the-shelf shape descriptor. A relational indexing strategy aims to retrieve symbol locations into the target documents by using a combined numerical-relational description of 2D structures. The zones which are likely to contain the queried symbol are validated by a Hough-like voting scheme. In addition, a performance evaluation framework for symbol spotting in graphical documents is proposed. The presented methodology has been evaluated with a benchmarking set of architectural documents achieving good performance results.

Abstract: This paper deals with the topic of performance evaluation of symbol recognition & spotting systems. We propose here a new approach to the generation of synthetic graphics documents containing non-isolated symbols in a real context. This approach is based on the definition of a set of constraints that permit us to place the symbols on a pre-defined background according to the properties of a particular domain (architecture, electronics, engineering, etc.). In this way, we can obtain a large amount of images resembling real documents by simply defining the set of constraints and providing a few pre-defined backgrounds. As documents are synthetically generated, the groundtruth (the location and the label of every symbol) becomes automatically available. We have applied this approach to the generation of a large database of architectural drawings and electronic diagrams, which shows the flexibility of the system. Performance evaluation experiments of a symbol localization system show that our approach permits to generate documents with different features that are reflected in variation of localization results.