Abstract: In this paper, we present an approach towards the retrieval of words from graphical document images. In graphical documents, due to presence of multi-oriented characters in non-structured layout, word indexing is a challenging task. The proposed approach uses recognition results of individual components to form character pairs with the neighboring components. An indexing scheme is designed to store the spatial description of components and to access them efficiently. Given a query text word (ascii/unicode format), the character pairs present in it are searched in the document. Next the retrieved character pairs are linked sequentially to form character string. Dynamic programming is applied to find different instances of query words. A string edit distance is used here to match the query word as the objective function. Recognition of multi-scale and multi-oriented character component is done using Support Vector Machine classifier. To consider multi-oriented character strings the features used in the SVM are invariant to character orientation. Experimental results show that the method is efficient to locate a query word from multi-oriented text in graphical documents.

Abstract: The design of a slide presentation is a creative process. In this process first, humans visualize in their minds what they want to explain. Then, they have to be able to represent this knowledge in an understandable way. There exists a lot of commercial software that allows to create our own slide presentations but the creativity of the user is rather limited. In this article we present an application that allows the user to create and visualize a slide presentation from a sketch. A slide may be seen as a graphical document or a diagram where its elements are placed in a particular spatial arrangement. To describe and recognize slides a syntactic approach is proposed. This approach is based on an Adjacency Grammar and a parsing methodology to cope with this kind of grammars. The experimental evaluation shows the performance of our methodology from a qualitative and a quantitative point of view. Six different slides containing different number of symbols, from 4 to 7, have been given to the users and they have drawn them without restrictions in the order of the elements. The quantitative results give an idea on how suitable is our methodology to describe and recognize the different elements in a slide.

Abstract: In this paper we present an algorithm for performance characterization of symbol localization systems. This algorithm is aimed to be a more “reliable” and “open” solution to characterize the performance. To achieve that, it exploits only single points as the result of localization and offers the possibility to reconsider the localization results provided by a system. We use the information about context in groundtruth, and overall localization results, to detect the ambiguous localization results. A probability score is computed for each matching between a localization point and a groundtruth region, depending on the spatial distribution of the other regions in the groundtruth. Final characterization is given with detection rate/probability score plots, describing the sets of possible interpretations of the localization results, according to a given confidence rate. We present experimentation details along with the results for the symbol localization system of [1], exploiting a synthetic dataset of architectural floorplans and electrical diagrams (composed of 200 images and 3861 symbols).

Abstract: Interpretation of graphical document images is a challenging task as it requires proper understanding of text/graphics symbols present in such documents. Difficulties arise in graphical document recognition when text and symbol overlapped/touched. Intersection of text and symbols with graphical lines and curves occur frequently in graphical documents and hence separation of such symbols is very difficult.
Several pattern recognition and classification techniques exist to recognize isolated text/symbol. But, the touching/overlapping text and symbol recognition has not yet been dealt successfully. An interesting technique, Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), originally devised for object recognition can take care of overlapping problems. Even if SIFT features have emerged as a very powerful object descriptors, their employment in graphical documents context has not been investigated much. In this paper we present the adaptation of the SIFT approach in the context of text character localization (spotting) in graphical documents. We evaluate the applicability of this technique in such documents and discuss the scope of improvement by combining some state-of-the-art approaches.

Abstract: This paper deals with the recognition of symbols and struc- tural 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 clus- tering 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 simila- rity 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.