Abstract: This chapter describes the most relevant approaches for the analysis of graphical documents. The graphics recognition pipeline can be splitted into three tasks. The low level or lexical task extracts the basic units composing the document. The syntactic level is focused on the structure, i.e., how graphical entities are constructed, and involves the location and classification of the symbols present in the document. The third level is a functional or semantic level, i.e., it models what the graphical symbols do and what they mean in the context where they appear. This chapter covers the lexical level, while the next two chapters are devoted to the syntactic and semantic level, respectively. The main problems reviewed in this chapter are raster-to-vector conversion (vectorization algorithms) and the separation of text and graphics components. The research and industrial communities have provided standard methods achieving reasonable performance levels. Hence, graphics recognition techniques can be considered to be in a mature state from a scientific point of view. Additionally this chapter provides insights on some related problems, namely, the extraction and recognition of dimensions in engineering drawings, and the recognition of hatched and tiled patterns. Both problems are usually associated, even integrated, in the vectorization process.

Abstract: Presently, man-machine interface development is a widespread research activity. A system to understand hand drawn architectural drawings in a CAD environment is presented in this paper. To understand a document, we have to identify its building elements and their structural properties. An attributed graph structure is chosen as a symbolic representation of the input document and the patterns to recognize in it. An inexact subgraph isomorphism procedure using relaxation labeling techniques is performed. In this paper we focus on how to speed up the matching. There is a building element, the walls, characterized by a hatching pattern. Using a straight line Hough transform (SLHT)-based method, we recognize this pattern, characterized by parallel straight lines, and remove from the input graph the edges belonging to this pattern. The isomorphism is then applied to the remainder of the input graph. When all the building elements have been recognized, the document is redrawn, correcting the inaccurate strokes obtained from a hand-drawn input.

Abstract: Symmetry is an important shape feature. In this paper, a simple and fast method to detect perfect and distorted rotational symmetries of 2D objects is described. The boundary of a shape is polygonally approximated and represented as a string. Rotational symmetries are found by cyclic string matching between two identical copies of the shape string. The set of minimum cost edit sequences that transform the shape string to a cyclically shifted version of itself define the rotational symmetry and its order. Finally, a modification of the algorithm is proposed to detect reflectional symmetries. Some experimental results are presented to show the reliability of the proposed algorithm

Abstract: A system to recognize hand drawn architectural drawings in a CAD environment has been deve- loped. In this paper we focus on its high level interpretation module. To interpret a floor plan, the system must identify several building elements, whose description is stored in a library of pat- terns, as well as their spatial relationships. We propose a structural approach based on subgraph isomorphism techniques to obtain a high-level interpretation of the document. The vectorized input document and the patterns to be recognized are represented by attributed graphs. Discrete relaxation techniques (AC4 algorithm) have been applied to develop the matching algorithm. The process has been divided in three steps: node labeling, local consistency and global consistency verification. The hand drawn creation causes disturbed line drawings with several accuracy errors, which must be taken into account. Here we have identified them and the AC4 algorithm has been adapted to manage them.