Abstract: Product graph has been shown as a way for matching subgraphs. This paper reports the extension of the product graph methodology for subgraph matching applied to symbol spotting in graphical documents. Here we focus on the two major limitations of the previous version of the algorithm: (1) spurious nodes and edges in the graph representation and (2) inefficient node and edge attributes. To deal with noisy information of vectorized graphical documents, we consider a dual edge graph representation on the original graph representing the graphical information and the product graph is computed between the dual edge graphs of the pattern graph and the target graph. The dual edge graph with redundant edges is helpful for efficient and tolerating encoding of the structural information of the graphical documents. The adjacency matrix of the product graph locates the pair of similar edges of two operand graphs and exponentiating the adjacency matrix finds similar random walks of greater lengths. Nodes joining similar random walks between two graphs are found by combining different weighted exponentials of adjacency matrices. An experimental investigation reveals that the recall obtained by this approach is quite encouraging.

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.

Abstract: This paper is focused on the categorization of administrative document images (such as invoices) based on the recognition of the supplier’s graphical logo. Two different methods are proposed, the first one uses a bag-of-visual-words model whereas the second one tries to locate logo images described by the blurred shape model descriptor within documents by a sliding-window technique. Preliminar results are reported with a dataset of real administrative documents.

Abstract: According to the Cambridge Dictionaries Online, a symbol is a sign, shape, or object that is used to represent something else. Symbol recognition is a subfield of general pattern recognition problems that focuses on identifying, detecting, and recognizing symbols in technical drawings, maps, or miscellaneous documents such as logos and musical scores. This chapter aims at providing the reader an overview of the different existing ways of describing and recognizing symbols and how the field has evolved to attain a certain degree of maturity.

Abstract: The analysis and recognition of music scores has attracted the interest of researchers for decades. Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is a classical research field of Document Image Analysis and Recognition (DIAR), whose aim is to extract information from music scores. Music scores contain both graphical and textual information, and for this reason, techniques are closely related to graphics recognition and text recognition. Since music scores use a particular diagrammatic notation that follow the rules of music theory, many approaches make use of context information to guide the recognition and solve ambiguities. This chapter overviews the main Optical Music Recognition (OMR) approaches. Firstly, the different methods are grouped according to the OMR stages, namely, staff removal, music symbol recognition, and syntactical analysis. Secondly, specific approaches for old and handwritten music scores are reviewed. Finally, online approaches and commercial systems are also commented.

Abstract: Person description is a challenging problem in computer vision. We investigated two major aspects of person description: 1) gender and 2) action recognition in still images. Most state-of-the-art approaches for gender and action recognition rely on the description of a single body part, such as face or full-body. However, relying on a single body part is suboptimal due to significant variations in scale, viewpoint, and pose in real-world images. This paper proposes a semantic pyramid approach for pose normalization. Our approach is fully automatic and based on combining information from full-body, upper-body, and face regions for gender and action recognition in still images. The proposed approach does not require any annotations for upper-body and face of a person. Instead, we rely on pretrained state-of-the-art upper-body and face detectors to automatically extract semantic information of a person. Given multiple bounding boxes from each body part detector, we then propose a simple method to select the best candidate bounding box, which is used for feature extraction. Finally, the extracted features from the full-body, upper-body, and face regions are combined into a single representation for classification. To validate the proposed approach for gender recognition, experiments are performed on three large data sets namely: 1) human attribute; 2) head-shoulder; and 3) proxemics. For action recognition, we perform experiments on four data sets most used for benchmarking action recognition in still images: 1) Sports; 2) Willow; 3) PASCAL VOC 2010; and 4) Stanford-40. Our experiments clearly demonstrate that the proposed approach, despite its simplicity, outperforms state-of-the-art methods for gender and action recognition.