Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of symbol spotting in technical document images applied to scanned and vectorized line drawings. Like any information spotting architecture, our approach has two components. First, symbols are decomposed in primitives which are compactly represented and second a primitive indexing structure aims to efficiently retrieve similar primitives. Primitives are encoded in terms of attributed strings representing closed regions. Similar strings are clustered in a lookup table so that the set median strings act as indexing keys. A voting scheme formulates hypothesis in certain locations of the line drawing image where there is a high presence of regions similar to the queried ones, and therefore, a high probability to find the queried graphical symbol. The proposed approach is illustrated in a framework consisting in spotting furniture symbols in architectural drawings. It has been proved to work even in the presence of noise and distortion introduced by the scanning and raster-to-vector processes.

Abstract: Symbol spotting systems are intended to retrieve regions of interest from a document image database where the queried symbol is likely to be found. They shall have the ability to recognize and locate graphical symbols in a single step. In this paper, we present a set of measures to evaluate the performance of a symbol spotting system in terms of recognition abilities, location accuracy and scalability. We show that the proposed measures allow to determine the weaknesses and strengths of different methods. In particular we have tested a symbol spotting method based on a set of four different off-the-shelf shape descriptors.

Abstract: The specific problem of symbol recognition in graphical documents requires additional techniques to those developed for character recognition. The most well-known obstacle is the so-called Sayre paradox: Correct recognition requires good segmentation, yet improvement in segmentation is achieved using information provided by the recognition process. This dilemma can be avoided by techniques that identify sets of regions containing useful information. Such symbol-spotting methods allow the detection of symbols in maps or technical drawings without having to fully segment or fully recognize the entire content.
This unique text/reference provides a complete, integrated and large-scale solution to the challenge of designing a robust symbol-spotting method for collections of graphic-rich documents. The book examines a number of features and descriptors, from basic photometric descriptors commonly used in computer vision techniques to those specific to graphical shapes, presenting a methodology which can be used in a wide variety of applications. Additionally, readers are supplied with an insight into the problem of performance evaluation of spotting methods. Some very basic knowledge of pattern recognition, document image analysis and graphics recognition is assumed.