Abstract: Graphical documents express complex concepts using a visual language. This language consists of a vocabulary (symbols) and a syntax (structural relations between symbols) that articulate a semantic meaning in a certain context. Therefore, the automatic interpretation by computers of these sort of documents entails three main steps: the detection of the symbols, the extraction of the structural relations between these symbols, and the modeling of the knowledge that permits the extraction of the semantics. Dierent domains in graphical documents include: architectural and engineering drawings, maps, owcharts, etc.
Graphics Recognition in particular and Document Image Analysis in general are
born from the industrial need of interpreting a massive amount of digitalized documents after the emergence of the scanner. Although many years have passed, the graphical document understanding problem still seems to be far from being solved. The main reason is that the vast majority of the systems in the literature focus on very specic problems, where the domain of the document dictates the implementation of the interpretation. As a result, it is dicult to reuse these strategies on dierent data and on dierent contexts, hindering thus the natural progress in the eld.
In this thesis, we face the graphical document understanding problem by proposing several relational models at dierent levels that are designed from a generic perspective. Firstly, we introduce three dierent strategies for the detection of symbols. The first method tackles the problem structurally, wherein general knowledge of the domain guides the detection. The second is a statistical method that learns the graphical appearance of the symbols and easily adapts to the big variability of the problem. The third method is a combination of the previous two methods that inherits their respective strengths, i.e. copes the big variability and does not need annotated data. Secondly, we present two relational strategies that tackle the problem of the visual context extraction. The first one is a full bottom up method that heuristically searches in a graph representation the contextual relations between symbols. Contrarily, the second is syntactic method that models probabilistically the structure of the documents. It automatically learns the model, which guides the inference algorithm to encounter the best structural representation for a given input. Finally, we construct a knowledge-based model consisting of an ontological denition of the domain and real data. This model permits to perform contextual reasoning and to detect semantic inconsistencies within the data. We evaluate the suitability of the proposed contributions in the framework of floor plan interpretation. Since there is no standard in the modeling of these documents there exists an enormous notation variability from plan to plan in terms of vocabulary and syntax. Therefore, floor plan interpretation is a relevant task in the graphical document understanding problem. It is also worth to mention that we make freely available all the resources used in this thesis {the data, the tool used to generate the data, and the evaluation scripts{ with the aim of fostering research in the graphical document understanding task.

Abstract: This paper proposes a runlength histogram signature as a perceptual descriptor of architectural plans in a retrieval scenario. The style of an architectural drawing is characterized by the perception of lines, shapes and texture. Such visual stimuli are the basis for defining semantic concepts as space properties, symmetry, density, etc. We propose runlength histograms extracted in vertical, horizontal and diagonal directions as a characterization of line and space properties in floorplans, so it can be roughly associated to a description of walls and room structure. A retrieval application illustrates the performance of the proposed approach, where given a plan as a query, similar ones are obtained from a database. A ground truth based on human observation has been constructed to validate the hypothesis. Additional retrieval results on sketched building’s facades are reported qualitatively in this paper. Its good description and its adaptability to two different sketch drawings despite its simplicity shows the interest of the proposed approach and opens a challenging research line in graphics recognition.

Abstract: This paper proposes a runlength histogram signature as a percetual descriptor of architectural plans in a retrieval scenario. The style of an architectural drawing is characterized by the perception of lines, shapes and texture. Such visual stimuli are the basis for defining semantic concepts as space properties, symmetry, density, etc. We propose runlength histograms extracted in vertical, horizontal and diagonal directions as a characterization of line and space properties in floorplans, so it can be roughly associated to a description of walls and room structure. A retrieval application illustrates the performance of the proposed approach, where given a plan as a query,
similar ones are obtained from a database. A ground truth based on human observation has been constructed to validate the hypothesis. Preliminary results show the interest of the proposed approach and opens a challenging research line in graphics recognition.

Abstract: This paper presents an evolution of the first unsupervised wall segmentation method in floor plans, that was presented by the authors in [1]. This first approach, contrarily to the existing ones, is able to segment walls independently to their notation and without the need of any pre-annotated data
to learn their visual appearance. Despite the good performance of the first approach, some specific cases, such as curved shaped walls, were not correctly segmented since they do not agree the strict structural assumptions that guide the whole methodology in order to be able to learn, in an unsupervised way, the structure of a wall. In this paper, we refine this strategy by dividing the
process in two steps. In a first step, potential wall segments are extracted unsupervisedly using a modification of [1], by restricting even more the areas considered as walls in a first moment. In a second step, these segments are used to learn and spot lost instances based on a modified version of [2], also presented by the authors. The presented combined method have been tested on
4 datasets with different notations and compared with the stateof-the-art applyed on the same datasets. The results show its adaptability to different wall notations and shapes, significantly outperforming the original approach.

Abstract: Segmentation of architectural floor plans is a challenging task, mainly because of the large variability in the notation between different plans. In general, traditional techniques, usually based on analyzing and grouping structural primitives obtained by vectorization, are only able to handle a reduced range of similar notations. In this paper we propose an alternative patch-based segmentation approach working at pixel level, without need of vectorization. The image is divided into a set of patches and a set of features is extracted for every patch. Then, each patch is assigned to a visual word of a previously learned vocabulary and given a probability of belonging to each class of objects. Finally, a post-process assigns the final label for every pixel. This approach has been applied to the detection of walls on two datasets of architectural floor plans with different notations, achieving high accuracy rates.

Abstract: Architectural floor plans exhibit a large variability in notation. Therefore, segmenting and identifying the elements of any kind of plan becomes a challenging task for approaches based on grouping structural primitives obtained by vectorization. Recently, a patch-based segmentation method working at pixel level and relying on the construction of a visual vocabulary has been proposed in [1], showing its adaptability to different notations by automatically learning the visual appearance of the elements in each different notation. This paper presents an evolution of that previous work, after analyzing and testing several alternatives for each of the different steps of the method: Firstly, an automatic plan-size normalization process is done. Secondly we evaluate different features to obtain the description of every patch. Thirdly, we train an SVM classifier to obtain the category of every patch instead of constructing a visual vocabulary. These variations of the method have been tested for wall detection on two datasets of architectural floor plans with different notations. After studying in deep each of the steps in the process pipeline, we are able to find the best system configuration, which highly outperforms the results on wall segmentation obtained by the original paper.

Abstract: In this paper we present a knowledge base of architectural documents aiming at improving existing methods of floor plan classification and understanding. It consists of an ontological definition of the domain and the inclusion of real instances coming from both, automatically interpreted and manually labeled documents. The knowledge base has proven to be an effective tool to structure our knowledge and to easily maintain and upgrade it. Moreover, it is an appropriate means to automatically check the consistency of relational data and a convenient complement of hard-coded knowledge interpretation systems.