Abstract: We describe a method for hand-drawn symbol recognition based on deformable template matching able to handle uncertainty and imprecision inherent to hand-drawing. Symbols are represented as a set of straight lines and their deformations as geometric transformations of these lines. Matching, however, is done over the original binary image to avoid loss of information during line detection. It is defined as an energy minimization problem, using a Bayesian framework which allows to combine fidelity to ideal shape of the symbol and flexibility to modify the symbol in order to get the best fit to the binary input image. Prior to matching, we find the best global transformation of the symbol to start the recognition process, based on the distance between symbol lines and image lines. We have applied this method to the recognition of dimensions and symbols in architectural floor plans and we show its flexibility to recognize distorted symbols.

Abstract: A hatched area is characterized by a set of parallel straight lines placed at regular intervals. In this paper, a Hough-based schema is introduced to recognize hatched areas in technical documents from attributed graph structures representing the document once it has been vectorized. Defining a Hough-based transform from a graph instead of the raster image allows to drastically reduce the processing time and, second, to obtain more reliable results because straight lines have already been detected in the vectorization step. A second advantage of the proposed method is that no assumptions must be made a priori about the slope and frequency of hatching patterns, but they are computed in run time for each hatched area.