Abstract: Graph-based representations are of broad use and applicability in pattern recognition. They exhibit, however, a major drawback with regards to the processing tools that are available in their domain. Graphembedding into vectorspaces is a growing field among the structural pattern recognition community which aims at providing a feature vector representation for every graph, and thus enables classical statistical learning machinery to be used on graph-based input patterns. In this work, we propose a novel embedding methodology for graphs with continuous nodeattributes and unattributed edges. The approach presented in this paper is based on statistics of the node labels and the edges between them, based on their similarity to a set of representatives. We specifically deal with an important issue of this methodology, namely, the selection of a suitable set of representatives. In an experimental evaluation, we empirically show the advantages of this novel approach in the context of different classification problems using several databases of graphs.

Abstract: The problem of texture segmentation and interpretation is one of the main concerns in the field of document analysis. Graphical documents often contain areas characterized by a structural texture whose recognition allows both the document understanding, and its storage in a more compact way. In this work, we focus on structural linial textures of regular repetition contained in plan documents. Starting from an atributed graph which represents the vectorized input image, we develop a method to segment textured areas and recognize their placement rules. We wish to emphasize that the searched textures do not follow a predefined pattern. Minimal closed loops of the input graph are computed, and then hierarchically clustered. In this hierarchical clustering, a distance function between two closed loops is defined in terms of their areas difference and boundary resemblance computed by a string matching procedure. Finally it is noted that, when the texture consists of isolated primitive elements, the same method can be used after computing a Voronoi Tesselation of the input graph.

Abstract: In this paper we propose an original sparse vector model for symbol retrieval task. More specically, we apply the K-SVD algorithm for learning a visual dictionary based on symbol descriptors locally computed around interest points. Results on benchmark datasets show that the obtained sparse representation is competitive related to state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, our sparse representation is invariant to rotation and scale transforms and also robust to degraded images and distorted symbols. Thereby, the learned visual dictionary is able to represent instances of unseen classes of symbols.

Abstract: This paper presents a syntactic approach based on Adjacency Grammars (AG) for sketch diagram modeling and understanding. Diagrams are a combination of graphical symbols arranged according to a set of spatial rules defined by a visual language. AG describe visual shapes by productions defined in terms of terminal and non-terminal symbols (graphical primitives and subshapes), and a set functions describing the spatial arrangements between symbols. Our approach to sketch diagram understanding provides three main contributions. First, since AG are linear grammars, there is a need to define shapes and relations inherently bidimensional using a sequential formalism. Second, our parsing approach uses an indexing structure based on a spatial tessellation. This serves to reduce the search space when finding candidates to produce a valid reduction. This allows order-free parsing of 2D visual sentences while keeping combinatorial explosion in check. Third, working with sketches requires a distortion model to cope with the natural variations of hand drawn strokes. To this end we extended the basic grammar with a distortion measure modeled on the allowable variation on spatial constraints associated with grammar productions. Finally, the paper reports on an experimental framework an interactive system for sketch analysis. User tests performed on two real scenarios show that our approach is usable in interactive settings.

Abstract: Text line segmentation in handwritten documents is an important task in the recognition of historical documents. Handwritten document images contain text lines with multiple orientations, touching and overlapping characters between consecutive text lines and different document structures, making line segmentation a difficult task. In this paper, we present a new approach for handwritten text line segmentation solving the problems of touching components, curvilinear text lines and horizontally overlapping components. The proposed algorithm formulates line segmentation as finding the central path in the area between two consecutive lines. This is solved as a graph traversal problem. A graph is constructed using the skeleton of the image. Then, a path-finding algorithm is used to find the optimum path between text lines. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on a comprehensive dataset consisting of five databases: ICDAR2009, ICDAR2013, UMD, the George Washington and the Barcelona Marriages Database. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art considering the different types and difficulties of the benchmarking data.