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 main advantage of segmentation by snakes consists in its ability to incorporate smoothness constraints on the detected shapes that can occur. Likewise, we propose to model snakes with other properties that reflect the information provided about the object of interest in a different extent. We consider different kinds of snakes, those searching for contours with a certain direction, those preserving an object’s model, those seeking for symmetry, those expanding open, etc. The availability of such a collection of snakes allows not only the more complete use of the knowledge about the segmented object, but also to solve some problems of the existing snakes. Our experiments on segmentation of facial features justify the usefulness of snakes with different properties.

Abstract: We describe a method for hand-drawn symbol recognition based on deformable template matching able to handle uncertainty and imprecision inherent to hand-drawing. Symbols are represented as a set of straight lines and their deformations as geometric transformations of these lines. Matching, however, is done over the original binary image to avoid loss of information during line detection. It is defined as an energy minimization problem, using a Bayesian framework which allows to combine fidelity to ideal shape of the symbol and flexibility to modify the symbol in order to get the best fit to the binary input image. Prior to matching, we find the best global transformation of the symbol to start the recognition process, based on the distance between symbol lines and image lines. We have applied this method to the recognition of dimensions and symbols in architectural floor plans and we show its flexibility to recognize distorted symbols.

Abstract: The Diagnosis of Left Ventricle (LV) pathologies is related to regional wall motion analysis. Health indicator scores such as the rotation and the torsion are useful for the diagnose of the Left Ventricle (LV) function. However, this requires proper identification of LV segments. On one hand, manual segmentation is robust, but it is slow and requires medical expertise. On the other hand, the tag pattern in Tagged Magnetic Resonance (TMR) sequences is a problem for the automatic segmentation of the LV boundaries. Consequently, we propose a method based in the classical formulation of parametric Snakes, combined with Active Shape models. Our semantic definition of the LV is tagged tissue that experiences motion in the systolic cycle. This defines two energy potentials for the Snake convergence. Additionally, the mean shape corrects excessive deviation from the anatomical shape. We have validated our approach in 15 healthy volunteers and two short axis cuts. In this way, we have compared the automatic segmentations to manual shapes outlined by medical experts. Also, we have explored the accuracy of clinical scores computed using automatic contours. The results show minor divergence in the approximation and the manual segmentations as well as robust computation of clinical scores in all cases. From this we conclude that the proposed method is a promising support tool for clinical analysis.