Abstract: This paper deals with the recognition of symbols and structural textures in architectural plans using string matching techniques. A plan is represented by an attributed graph whose nodes represent characteristic points and whose edges represent segments. Symbols and textures can be seen as a set of regions, i.e. closed loops in the graph, with a particular arrangement. The search for a symbol involves a graph matching between the regions of a model graph and the regions of the graph representing the document. Discriminating a texture means a clustering of neighbouring regions of this graph. Both procedures involve a similarity measure between graph regions. A string codification is used to represent the sequence of outlining edges of a region. Thus, the similarity between two regions is defined in terms of the string edit distance between their boundary strings. The use of string matching allows the recognition method to work also under presence of distortion.

Abstract: The recognition of symbols in graphic documents is an intensive research activity in the community of pattern recognition and document analysis. A key issue in the interpretation of maps, engineering drawings, diagrams, etc. is the recognition of domain dependent symbols according to a symbol database. In this work we first review the most outstanding symbol recognition methods from two different points of view: application domains and pattern recognition methods. In the second part of the paper, open and unaddressed problems involved in symbol recognition are described, analyzing their current state of art and discussing future research challenges. Thus, issues such as symbol representation, matching, segmentation, learning, scalability of recognition methods and performance evaluation are addressed in this work. Finally, we discuss the perspectives of symbol recognition concerning to new paradigms such as user interfaces in handheld computers or document database and WWW indexing by graphical content.