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: Accurate symbol recognition in graphic documents needs an accurate representation of the symbols to be recognized. If structural approaches are used for recognition, symbols have to be described in terms of their shape, using structural relationships among extracted features. Unlike statistical pattern recognition, in structural methods, symbols are usually manually defined from expertise knowledge, and not automatically infered from sample images. In this work we explain one approach to learn from examples a representative structural description of a symbol, thus providing better information about shape variability. The description of a symbol is based on a probabilistic model. It consists of a set of lines described by the mean and the variance of line parameters, respectively providing information about the model of the symbol, and its shape variability. The representation of each image in the sample set as a set of lines is achieved using deformable template matching.

Abstract: This paper presents a methodology for shape recognition that focuses on dealing with the difficult problem of large deformations. The proposed methodology consists in a novel feature extraction technique, which uses a non-rigid representation adaptable to the shape. This technique employs a deformable grid based on the computation of geometrical centroids that follows a region partitioning algorithm. Then, a feature vector is extracted by computing pixel density measures around these geometrical centroids. The result is a shape descriptor that adapts its representation to the given shape and encodes the pixel density distribution. The validity of the method when dealing with large deformations has been experimentally shown over datasets composed of handwritten shapes. It has been applied to signature verification and shape recognition tasks demonstrating high accuracy and low computational cost.