Abstract: In this paper we present an algorithm for performance characterization of symbol localization systems. This algorithm is aimed to be a more “reliable” and “open” solution to characterize the performance. To achieve that, it exploits only single points as the result of localization and offers the possibility to reconsider the localization results provided by a system. We use the information about context in groundtruth, and overall localization results, to detect the ambiguous localization results. A probability score is computed for each matching between a localization point and a groundtruth region, depending on the spatial distribution of the other regions in the groundtruth. Final characterization is given with detection rate/probability score plots, describing the sets of possible interpretations of the localization results, according to a given confidence rate. We present experimentation details along with the results for the symbol localization system of [1], exploiting a synthetic dataset of architectural floorplans and electrical diagrams (composed of 200 images and 3861 symbols).

Abstract: Interpretation of graphical document images is a challenging task as it requires proper understanding of text/graphics symbols present in such documents. Difficulties arise in graphical document recognition when text and symbol overlapped/touched. Intersection of text and symbols with graphical lines and curves occur frequently in graphical documents and hence separation of such symbols is very difficult.
Several pattern recognition and classification techniques exist to recognize isolated text/symbol. But, the touching/overlapping text and symbol recognition has not yet been dealt successfully. An interesting technique, Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), originally devised for object recognition can take care of overlapping problems. Even if SIFT features have emerged as a very powerful object descriptors, their employment in graphical documents context has not been investigated much. In this paper we present the adaptation of the SIFT approach in the context of text character localization (spotting) in graphical documents. We evaluate the applicability of this technique in such documents and discuss the scope of improvement by combining some state-of-the-art approaches.

Abstract: The importance of logos and trademarks in nowadays society is indisputable, variably seen under a positive light as a valuable service for consumers or a negative one as a catalyst of ever-increasing consumerism. This chapter discusses the technical approaches for enabling machines to work with logos, looking into the latest methodologies for logo detection, localization, representation, recognition, retrieval, and spotting in a variety of media. This analysis is presented in the context of three different applications covering the complete depth and breadth of state of the art techniques. These are trademark retrieval systems, logo recognition in document images, and logo detection and removal in images and videos. This chapter, due to the very nature of logos and trademarks, brings together various facets of document image analysis spanning graphical and textual content, while it links document image analysis to other computer vision domains, especially when it comes to the analysis of real-scene videos and images.

Abstract: This paper presents a system capable of recognizing six head gestures: nodding, shaking, turning right, turning left, looking up, and looking down. The main difference of our system compared to other methods is that the Hidden Markov Models presented in this paper, are fully connected and consider all possible states in any given order, providing the following advantages to the system: (1) allows unconstrained movement of the head and (2) it can be easily integrated into a wearable device (e.g. glasses, neck-hung devices), in which case it can robustly recognize gestures in the presence of ego-motion. Experimental results show that this approach outperforms common methods that use restricted HMMs for each gesture.

Abstract: In this chapter, we introduce the problem of identity inference as a generalization of person re-identification. It is most appropriate to distinguish identity inference from re-identification in situations where a large number of observations must be identified without knowing a priori that groups of test images represent the same individual. The standard single- and multishot person re-identification common in the literature are special cases of our formulation. We present an approach to solving identity inference by modeling it as a labeling problem in a Conditional Random Field (CRF). The CRF model ensures that the final labeling gives similar labels to detections that are similar in feature space. Experimental results are given on the ETHZ, i-LIDS and CAVIAR datasets. Our approach yields state-of-the-art performance for multishot re-identification, and our results on the more general identity inference problem demonstrate that we are able to infer the identity of very many examples even with very few labeled images in the gallery.

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: Graph representation of graphical documents often suffers from noise such as spurious nodes and edges, and their discontinuity. In general these errors occur during the low-level image processing viz. binarization, skeletonization, vectorization etc. Hierarchical graph representation is a nice and efficient way to solve this kind of problem by hierarchically merging node-node and node-edge depending on the distance. But the creation of hierarchical graph representing the graphical information often uses hard thresholds on the distance to create the hierarchical nodes (next state) of the lower nodes (or states) of a graph. As a result, the representation often loses useful information. This paper introduces plausibilities to the nodes of hierarchical graph as a function of distance and proposes a modified algorithm for matching subgraphs of the hierarchical graphs. The plausibility-annotated nodes help to improve the performance of the matching algorithm on two hierarchical structures. To show the potential of this approach, we conduct an experiment with the SESYD dataset.