Abstract: Object detection in documents is a key step to automate the structural elements identification process in a digital or scanned document through understanding the hierarchical structure and relationships between different elements. Large and complex models, while achieving high accuracy, can be computationally expensive and memory-intensive, making them impractical for deployment on resource constrained devices. Knowledge distillation allows us to create small and more efficient models that retain much of the performance of their larger counterparts. Here we present a graph-based knowledge distillation framework to correctly identify and localize the document objects in a document image. Here, we design a structured graph with nodes containing proposal-level features and edges representing the relationship between the different proposal regions. Also, to reduce text bias an adaptive node sampling strategy is designed to prune the weight distribution and put more weightage on non-text nodes. We encode the complete graph as a knowledge representation and transfer it from the teacher to the student through the proposed distillation loss by effectively capturing both local and global information concurrently. Extensive experimentation on competitive benchmarks demonstrates that the proposed framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches. The code will be available at: this https URL.

Abstract: This paper presents a system to understand hand drawn architectural drawings in a CAD environment. The procedure is to identify in a floor plan the building elements, stored in a library of patterns, and their spatial relationships. The vectorized input document and the patterns to recognize are represented by attributed graphs. To recognize the patterns as such, we apply a structural approach based on subgraph isomorphism techniques. In spite of their value, graph matching techniques do not recognize adequately those building elements characterized by hatching patterns, i.e. walls. Here we focus on the recognition of hatching patterns and develop a straight line Hough transform based method in order to detect the regions filled in with parallel straight fines. This allows not only to recognize filling patterns, but it actually reduces the computational load associated with the subgraph isomorphism computation. The result is that the document can be redrawn by editing all the patterns recognized

Abstract: Hand-drawn symbols can take many different and distorted shapes from their ideal representation. Then, very flexible methods are needed to be able to handle unconstrained drawings. We propose here to extend our previous work in hand-drawn symbol recognition based on a Bayesian framework and deformable template matching. This approach gets flexibility enough to fit distorted shapes in the drawing while keeping fidelity to the ideal shape of the symbol. In this work, we define the similarity measure between an image and a symbol based on the distance from every pixel in the image to the lines in the symbol. Matching is carried out using an implementation of the EM algorithm. Thus, we can improve recognition rates and computation time with respect to our previous formulation based on a simulated annealing algorithm.