Abstract: This paper explores the utilization of product graph for spotting symbols on graphical documents. Product graph is intended to find the candidate subgraphs or components in the input graph containing the paths similar to the query graph. The acute angle between two edges and their length ratio are considered as the node labels. In a second step, each of the candidate subgraphs in the input graph is assigned with a distance measure computed by a random walk kernel. Actually it is the minimum of the distances of the component to all the components of the model graph. This distance measure is then used to eliminate dissimilar components. The remaining neighboring components are grouped and the grouped zone is considered as a retrieval zone of a symbol similar to the queried one. The entire method works online, i.e., it doesn't need any preprocessing step. The present paper reports the initial results of the method, which are very encouraging.

Abstract: Unconstrained handwritten text recognition systems maximize the combination of two separate probability scores. The first one is the observation probability that indicates how well the returned word sequence matches the input image. The second score is the probability that reflects how likely a word sequence is according to a language model. Current state-of-the-art recognition systems use statistical language models in form of bigram word probabilities. This paper proposes to model the target language by means of a recurrent neural network with long-short term memory cells. Because the network is recurrent, the considered context is not limited to a fixed size especially as the memory cells are designed to deal with long-term dependencies. In a set of experiments conducted on the IAM off-line database we show the superiority of the proposed language model over statistical n-gram models.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new approach to extract text regions from graphical documents. In our method, we first empirically construct two sequences of learned dictionaries for the text and graphical parts respectively. Then, we compute the sparse representations of all different sizes and non-overlapped document patches in these learned dictionaries. Based on these representations, each patch can be classified into the text or graphic category by comparing its reconstruction errors. Same-sized patches in one category are then merged together to define the corresponding text or graphic layers which are combined to createfinal text/graphic layer. Finally, in a post-processing step, text regions are further filtered out by using some learned thresholds.

Abstract: Human detection in computer vision field is an active field of research. Extending this to human-like drawings such as the main characters in comic book stories is not trivial. Comics analysis is a very recent field of research at the intersection of graphics, texts, objects and people recognition. The detection of the main comic characters is an essential step towards a fully automatic comic book understanding. This paper presents a color-based approach for comics character retrieval using content-based drawing retrieval and color palette.