Abstract: Relatively little research has been done on the topic of patent image retrieval and in general in most of the approaches the retrieval is performed in terms of a similarity measure between the query image and the images in the corpus. However, systems aimed at overcoming the semantic gap between the visual description of patent images and their conveyed concepts would be very helpful for patent professionals. In this paper we present a flowchart recognition method aimed at achieving a structured representation of flowchart images that can be further queried semantically. The proposed method was submitted to the CLEF-IP 2012 flowchart recognition task. We report the obtained results on this dataset.

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: We propose an approach to multi-writer word spotting, where the goal is to find a query word in a dataset comprised of document images. We propose an attributes-based approach that leads to a low-dimensional, fixed-length representation of the word images that is fast to compute and, especially, fast to compare. This approach naturally leads to an unified representation of word images and strings, which seamlessly allows one to indistinctly perform query-by-example, where the query is an image, and query-by-string, where the query is a string. We also propose a calibration scheme to correct the attributes scores based on Canonical Correlation Analysis that greatly improves the results on a challenging dataset. We test our approach on two public datasets showing state-of-the-art results.

Abstract: best paper award
In this paper, we propose an algorithm for denoising document images using sparse representations. Following a training set, this algorithm is able to learn the main document characteristics and also, the kind of noise included into the documents. In this perspective, we propose to model the noise energy based on the normalized cross-correlation between pairs of noisy and non-noisy documents. Experimental
results on several datasets demonstrate the robustness of our method compared with the state-of-the-art.

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.