Abstract: In this paper we propose a symbol spotting technique through hashing the shape descriptors of graph paths (Hamiltonian paths). Complex graphical structures in line drawings can be efficiently represented by graphs, which ease the accurate localization of the model symbol. Graph paths are the factorized substructures of graphs which enable robust recognition even in the presence of noise and distortion. In our framework, the entire database of the graphical documents is indexed in hash tables by the locality sensitive hashing (LSH) of shape descriptors of the paths. The hashing data structure aims to execute an approximate k-NN search in a sub-linear time. The spotting method is formulated by a spatial voting scheme to the list of locations of the paths that are decided during the hash table lookup process. We perform detailed experiments with various dataset of line drawings and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the technique.

Abstract: This paper presents the results of the first Challenge of ICDAR 2011 Robust Reading Competition. Challenge 1 is focused on the extraction of text from born-digital images, specifically from images found in Web pages and emails. The challenge was organized in terms of three tasks that look at different stages of the process: text localization, text segmentation and word recognition. In this paper we present the results of the challenge for all three tasks, and make an open call for continuous participation outside the context of ICDAR 2011.

Abstract: This paper deals with a subgraph matching problem in Region Adjacency Graph (RAG) applied to symbol spotting in graphical documents. RAG is a very important, efficient and natural way of representing graphical information with a graph but this is limited to cases where the information is well defined with perfectly delineated regions. What if the information we are interested in is not confined within well defined regions? This paper addresses this particular problem and solves it by defining near convex grouping of oriented line segments which results in near convex regions. Pure convexity imposes hard constraints and can not handle all the cases efficiently. Hence to solve this problem we have defined a new type of convexity of regions, which allows convex regions to have concavity to some extend. We call this kind of regions Near Convex Regions (NCRs). These NCRs are then used to create the Near Convex Region Adjacency Graph (NCRAG) and with this representation we have formulated the problem of symbol spotting in graphical documents as a subgraph matching problem. For subgraph matching we have used the Approximate Edit Distance Algorithm (AEDA) on the neighborhood string, which starts working after finding a key node in the input or target graph and iteratively identifies similar nodes of the query graph in the neighborhood of the key node. The experiments are performed on artificial, real and distorted datasets.

Abstract: The first competition on music scores that was organized at ICDAR in 2011 awoke the interest of researchers, who participated both at staff removal and writer identification tasks. In this second edition, we focus on the staff removal task and simulate a real case scenario: old music scores. For this purpose, we have generated a new set of images using two kinds of degradations: local noise and 3D distortions. This paper describes the dataset, distortion methods, evaluation metrics, the participant's methods and the obtained results.

Abstract: In this paper we present a method for the segmentation of continuous page streams into multipage documents and the simultaneous classification of the resulting documents. We first present an approach to combine the multiple pages of a document into a single feature vector that represents the whole document. Despite its simplicity and low computational cost, the proposed representation yields results comparable to more complex methods in multipage document classification tasks. We then exploit this representation in the context of page stream segmentation. The most plausible segmentation of a page stream into a sequence of multipage documents is obtained by optimizing a statistical model that represents the probability of each segmented multipage document belonging to a particular class. Experimental results are reported on a large sample of real administrative multipage documents.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new approach for symbol description. Our method is built based on the combination of shape context of interest points descriptor and sparse representation. More specifically, we first learn a dictionary describing shape context of interest point descriptors. Then, based on information retrieval techniques, we build a vector model for each symbol based on its sparse representation in a visual vocabulary whose visual words are columns in the learneddictionary. The retrieval task is performed by ranking symbols based on similarity between vector models. Evaluation of our method, using benchmark datasets, demonstrates the validity of our approach and shows that it outperforms related state-of-theart methods.

Abstract: In this paper we present a handwritten line segmentation method devised to work on documents composed of several paragraphs with multiple line orientations. The method is based on a variation of the EM algorithm for the estimation of a set of regression lines between the connected components that compose the image. We evaluated our method on the ICDAR2009 handwriting segmentation contest dataset with promising results that overcome most of the presented methods. In addition, we prove the usability of the presented method by performing line segmentation on the George Washington database obtaining encouraging results.

Abstract: Wall detection in floor plans is a crucial step in a complete floor plan recognition system. Walls define the main structure of buildings and convey essential information for the detection of other structural elements. Nevertheless, wall segmentation is a difficult task, mainly because of the lack of a standard graphical notation. The existing approaches are restricted to small group of similar notations or require the existence of pre-annotated corpus of input images to learn each new notation. In this paper we present an automatic wall segmentation system, with the ability to handle completely different notations without the need of any annotated dataset. It only takes advantage of the general knowledge that walls are a repetitive element, naturally distributed within the plan and commonly modeled by straight parallel lines. The method has been tested on four datasets of real floor plans with different notations, and compared with the state-of-the-art. The results show its suitability for different graphical notations, achieving higher recall rates than the rest of the methods while keeping a high average precision.