Abstract: Effective information retrieval on handwritten document images has always been a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel handwritten word spotting approach based on graph representation. The presented model comprises both topological and morphological signatures of handwriting. Skeleton-based graphs with the Shape Context labelled vertexes are established for connected components. Each word image is represented as a sequence of graphs. In order to be robust to the handwriting variations, an exhaustive merging process based on DTW alignment result is introduced in the similarity measure between word images. With respect to the computation complexity, an approximate graph edit distance approach using bipartite matching is employed for graph matching. The experiments on the George Washington dataset and the marriage records from the Barcelona Cathedral dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art structural methods.

Abstract: Graph-based representations are experiencing a growing usage in visual recognition and retrieval due to their representational power in front of classical appearance-based representations in terms of feature vectors. Retrieving a query graph from a large dataset of graphs has the drawback of the high computational complexity required to compare the query and the target graphs. The most important property for a large-scale retrieval is the search time complexity to be sub-linear in the number of database examples. In this paper we propose a fast indexation formalism for graph retrieval. A binary embedding is defined as hashing keys for graph nodes. Given a database of labeled graphs, graph nodes are complemented with vectors of attributes representing their local context. Hence, each attribute counts the length of a walk of order k originated in a vertex with label l. Each attribute vector is converted to a binary code applying a binary-valued hash function. Therefore, graph retrieval is formulated in terms of finding target graphs in the database whose nodes have a small Hamming distance from the query nodes, easily computed with bitwise logical operators. As an application example, we validate the performance of the proposed methods in a handwritten word spotting scenario in images of historical documents.

Abstract: The Graph of Words Embedding consists in mapping every graph in a given dataset to a feature vector by counting unary and binary relations between node attributes of the graph. It has been shown to perform well for graphs with discrete label alphabets. In this paper we extend the methodology to graphs with n-dimensional continuous attributes by selecting node representatives. We propose three different discretization procedures for the attribute space and experimentally evaluate the dependence on both the selector and the number of node representatives. In the context of graph classification, the experimental results reveal that on two out of three public databases the proposed extension achieves superior performance over a standard reference system.

Abstract: By means of computer vision algorithms scanned images of maps are processed in order to extract relevant geographic information from printed coordinate pairs. The meaningful information is then transformed into georeferencing information for each single map sheet, and the complete set is compiled to produce a graphical index sheet for the map series along with relevant metadata. The whole process is fully automated and trained to attain maximum effectivity and throughput.