Abstract: In this paper, we present an approach towards the retrieval of words from graphical document images. In graphical documents, due to presence of multi-oriented characters in non-structured layout, word indexing is a challenging task. The proposed approach uses recognition results of individual components to form character pairs with the neighboring components. An indexing scheme is designed to store the spatial description of components and to access them efficiently. Given a query text word (ascii/unicode format), the character pairs present in it are searched in the document. Next the retrieved character pairs are linked sequentially to form character string. Dynamic programming is applied to find different instances of query words. A string edit distance is used here to match the query word as the objective function. Recognition of multi-scale and multi-oriented character component is done using Support Vector Machine classifier. To consider multi-oriented character strings the features used in the SVM are invariant to character orientation. Experimental results show that the method is efficient to locate a query word from multi-oriented text in graphical documents.

Abstract: In this article, a system to detect rooms in architectural floor plan images is described. We first present a primitive extraction algorithm for line detection. It is based on an original coupling of classical Hough transform with image vectorization in order to perform robust and efficient line detection. We show how the lines that satisfy some graphical arrangements are combined into walls. We also present the way we detect some door hypothesis thanks to the extraction of arcs. Walls and door hypothesis are then used by our room segmentation strategy; it consists in recursively decomposing the image until getting nearly convex regions. The notion of convexity is difficult to quantify, and the selection of separation lines between regions can also be rough. We take advantage of knowledge associated to architectural floor plans in order to obtain mostly rectangular rooms. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations performed on a corpus of real documents show promising results.

Abstract: In this paper we tackle the problem of document image retrieval by combining a similarity measure between documents and the probability that a given document belongs to a certain class. The membership probability to a specific class is computed using Support Vector Machines in conjunction with similarity measure based kernel applied to structural document representations. In the presented experiments, we use different document representations, both visual and structural, and we apply them to a database of historical documents. We show how our method based on similarity kernels outperforms the usual distance-based retrieval.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel rotation and scale invariant method for colour logo retrieval and classification, which involves performing a simple colour segmentation and subsequently describing each of the resultant colour components based on a set of topological and colour features. A polar representation is used to represent the logo and the subsequent logo matching is based on Cyclic Dynamic Time Warping (CDTW). We also show how combining information about the global distribution of the logo components and their local neighbourhood using the Delaunay triangulation allows to improve the results. All experiments are performed on a dataset of 2500 instances of 100 colour logo images in different rotations and scales.

Abstract: Historical ciphers, a special type of manuscripts, contain encrypted information, important for the interpretation of our history. The first step towards decipherment is to transcribe the images, either manually or by automatic image processing techniques. Despite the improvements in handwritten text recognition (HTR) thanks to deep learning methodologies, the need of labelled data to train is an important limitation. Given that ciphers often use symbol sets across various alphabets and unique symbols without any transcription scheme available, these supervised HTR techniques are not suitable to transcribe ciphers. In this paper we propose an un-supervised method for transcribing encrypted manuscripts based on clustering and label propagation, which has been successfully applied to community detection in networks. We analyze the performance on ciphers with various symbol sets, and discuss the advantages and drawbacks compared to supervised HTR methods.