Abstract: Symbol spotting can be defined as locating given query symbol in a large collection of graphical documents. In this paper we present a hierarchical graph representation for symbols. This representation allows graph matching methods to deal with low-level vectorization errors and, thus, to perform a robust symbol spotting. To show the potential of this approach, we conduct an experiment with the SESYD dataset.

Abstract: The recognition of unconstrained handwriting images is usually based on vectorial representation and statistical classification. Despite their high representational power, graphs are rarely used in this field due to a lack of efficient graph-based recognition methods. Recently, graph similarity features have been proposed to bridge the gap between structural representation and statistical classification by means of vector space embedding. This approach has shown a high performance in terms of accuracy but had shortcomings in terms of computational speed. The time complexity of the Hungarian algorithm that is used to approximate the edit distance between two handwriting graphs is demanding for a real-world scenario. In this paper, we propose a faster graph matching algorithm which is derived from the Hausdorff distance. On the historical Parzival database it is demonstrated that the proposed method achieves a speedup factor of 12.9 without significant loss in recognition accuracy.

Abstract: This note introduces a visual attention model of text localization in real-world scenes. The core of the model built upon the proto-object concept is discussed. It is shown how such dynamic mid-level representation of the scene can be derived in the framework of an action-perception loop engaging salience, text information value computation, and eye guidance mechanisms.
Preliminary results that compare model generated scanpaths with those eye-tracked from human subjects are presented.

Abstract: Product graph has been shown as a way for matching subgraphs. This paper reports the extension of the product graph methodology for subgraph matching applied to symbol spotting in graphical documents. Here we focus on the two major limitations of the previous version of the algorithm: (1) spurious nodes and edges in the graph representation and (2) inefficient node and edge attributes. To deal with noisy information of vectorized graphical documents, we consider a dual edge graph representation on the original graph representing the graphical information and the product graph is computed between the dual edge graphs of the pattern graph and the target graph. The dual edge graph with redundant edges is helpful for efficient and tolerating encoding of the structural information of the graphical documents. The adjacency matrix of the product graph locates the pair of similar edges of two operand graphs and exponentiating the adjacency matrix finds similar random walks of greater lengths. Nodes joining similar random walks between two graphs are found by combining different weighted exponentials of adjacency matrices. An experimental investigation reveals that the recall obtained by this approach is quite encouraging.

Abstract: This paper proposes a runlength histogram signature as a perceptual descriptor of architectural plans in a retrieval scenario. The style of an architectural drawing is characterized by the perception of lines, shapes and texture. Such visual stimuli are the basis for defining semantic concepts as space properties, symmetry, density, etc. We propose runlength histograms extracted in vertical, horizontal and diagonal directions as a characterization of line and space properties in floorplans, so it can be roughly associated to a description of walls and room structure. A retrieval application illustrates the performance of the proposed approach, where given a plan as a query, similar ones are obtained from a database. A ground truth based on human observation has been constructed to validate the hypothesis. Additional retrieval results on sketched building’s facades are reported qualitatively in this paper. Its good description and its adaptability to two different sketch drawings despite its simplicity shows the interest of the proposed approach and opens a challenging research line in graphics recognition.