Abstract: The specific problem of symbol recognition in graphical documents requires additional techniques to those developed for character recognition. The most well-known obstacle is the so-called Sayre paradox: Correct recognition requires good segmentation, yet improvement in segmentation is achieved using information provided by the recognition process. This dilemma can be avoided by techniques that identify sets of regions containing useful information. Such symbol-spotting methods allow the detection of symbols in maps or technical drawings without having to fully segment or fully recognize the entire content.
This unique text/reference provides a complete, integrated and large-scale solution to the challenge of designing a robust symbol-spotting method for collections of graphic-rich documents. The book examines a number of features and descriptors, from basic photometric descriptors commonly used in computer vision techniques to those specific to graphical shapes, presenting a methodology which can be used in a wide variety of applications. Additionally, readers are supplied with an insight into the problem of performance evaluation of spotting methods. Some very basic knowledge of pattern recognition, document image analysis and graphics recognition is assumed.

Abstract: In order to improve the results of automatically recognized handwritten text, information about the language is commonly included in the recognition process. A common approach is to represent a text line as a sequence. It is processed in one direction and the language information via n-grams is directly included in the decoding. This approach, however, only uses context on one side to estimate a word’s probability. Therefore, we propose a bidirectional recognition in this paper, using distinct forward and a backward language models. By combining decoding hypotheses from both directions, we achieve a significant increase in recognition accuracy for the off-line writer independent handwriting recognition task. Both language models are of the same type and can be estimated on the same corpus. Hence, the increase in recognition accuracy comes without any additional need for training data or language modeling complexity.

Abstract: Graph embeddings in vector spaces aim at assigning a pattern vector to every graph so that the problems of graph classification and clustering can be solved by using data processing algorithms originally developed for statistical feature vectors. An important requirement graph features should fulfil is that they reproduce as much as possible the properties among objects in the graph domain. In particular, it is usually desired that distances between pairs of graphs in the graph domain closely resemble those between their corresponding vectorial representations. In this work, we analyse relations between the edit distance in the graph domain and the L1 distance of the attribute statistics based embedding, for which good classification performance has been reported on various datasets. We show that there is actually a high correlation between the two kinds of distances provided that the corresponding parameter values that account for balancing the weight between node and edge based features are properly selected.