Abstract: There is a resurgence in the use of structural approaches in the usual object recognition and retrieval problem. Graph theory, in particular, graph matching plays a relevant role in that. Specifically, the detection of an object (or a part of that) in an image in terms of structural features can be formulated as a subgraph matching. Subgraph matching is a challenging task. Specially due to the presence of outliers most of the graph matching algorithms do not perform well in subgraph matching scenario. Also exact subgraph isomorphism has proven to be an NP-complete problem. So naturally, in graph matching community, there are lot of efforts addressing the problem of subgraph matching within suboptimal bound. Most of them work with approximate algorithms that try to get an inexact solution in estimated way. In addition, usual recognition must cope with distortion. Inexact graph matching consists in finding the best isomorphism under a similarity measure. Theoretically this thesis proposes algorithms for solving subgraph matching in an approximate and inexact way.
We consider the symbol spotting problem on graphical documents or line drawings from application point of view. This is a well known problem in the graphics recognition community. It can be further applied for indexing and classification of documents based on their contents. The structural nature of this kind of documents easily motivates one for giving a graph based representation. So the symbol spotting problem on graphical documents can be considered as a subgraph matching problem. The main challenges in this application domain is the noise and distortions that might come during the usage, digitalization and raster to vector conversion of those documents. Apart from that computer vision nowadays is not any more confined within a limited number of images. So dealing a huge number of images with graph based method is a further challenge.
In this thesis, on one hand, we have worked on efficient and robust graph representation to cope with the noise and distortions coming from documents. On the other hand, we have worked on different graph based methods and framework to solve the subgraph matching problem in a better approximated way, which can also deal with considerable number of images. Firstly, we propose a symbol spotting method by hashing serialized subgraphs. Graph serialization allows to create factorized substructures such as graph paths, which can be organized in hash tables depending on the structural similarities of the serialized subgraphs. The involvement of hashing techniques helps to reduce the search space substantially and speeds up the spotting procedure. Secondly, we introduce contextual similarities based on the walk based propagation on tensor product graph. These contextual similarities involve higher order information and more reliable than pairwise similarities. We use these higher order similarities to formulate subgraph matching as a node and edge selection problem in the tensor product graph. Thirdly, we propose near convex grouping to form near convex region adjacency graph which eliminates the limitations of traditional region adjacency graph representation for graphic recognition. Fourthly, we propose a hierarchical graph representation by simplifying/correcting the structural errors to create a hierarchical graph of the base graph. Later these hierarchical graph structures are matched with some graph matching methods. Apart from that, in this thesis we have provided an overall experimental comparison of all the methods and some of the state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, some dataset models have also been proposed.

Abstract: In this thesis we explore information Extraction from totally or partially handwritten documents. Basically we are dealing with two different application scenarios. The first scenario are modern highly structured documents like forms. In this kind of documents, the semantic information is encoded in different fields with a pre-defined location in the document, therefore, information extraction becomes roughly equivalent to transcription. The second application scenario are loosely structured totally handwritten documents, besides transcribing them, we need to assign a semantic label, from a set of known values to the handwritten words.
In both scenarios, transcription is an important part of the information extraction. For that reason in this thesis we present two methods based on Neural Networks, to transcribe handwritten text.In order to tackle the challenge of loosely structured documents, we have produced a benchmark, consisting of a dataset, a defined set of tasks and a metric, that was presented to the community as an international competition. Also, we propose different models based on Convolutional and Recurrent neural networks that are able to transcribe and assign different semantic labels to each handwritten words, that is, able to perform Information Extraction.

Abstract: Handwritten marriage licenses books are characterized by a simple structure of the text in the records with an evolutionary vocabulary, mainly composed of proper names that change along the time. This distinct vocabulary makes automatic transcription and semantic information extraction difficult tasks. Previous works have shown that the use of category-based language models and a Grammatical Inference technique known as MGGI can improve the accuracy of these
tasks. However, the application of the MGGI algorithm requires an a priori knowledge to label the words of the training strings, that is not always easy to obtain. In this paper we study how to automatically obtain the information required by the MGGI algorithm using a technique based on Confusion Networks. Using the resulting language model, full handwritten text recognition and information extraction experiments have been carried out with results supporting the proposed approach.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new data-driven approach for binary descriptor selection. In order to draw a clear analysis of common designs, we present a general information-theoretic selection paradigm. It encompasses several standard binary descriptor construction schemes, including a recent state-of-the-art one named BOLD. We pursue the same endeavor to increase the stability of the produced descriptors with respect to rotations. To achieve this goal, we have designed a novel offline selection criterion which is better adapted to the online matching procedure. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated on two standard datasets, where our descriptor is compared to BOLD and to several classical descriptors. In particular, it emerges that our approach can reproduce equivalent if not better performance as BOLD while relying on twice shorter descriptors. Such an improvement can be influential for real-time applications.

Abstract: In this chapter we describe a system for document retrieval and classification following the interactive-predictive framework. In particular, the system addresses two different scenarios of document analysis: document classification based on visual appearance and logo detection. These two classical problems of document analysis are formulated following the interactive-predictive model, taking the user interaction into account to make easier the process of annotating and labelling the documents. A system implementing this model in a real scenario is presented and analyzed. This system also takes advantage of active learning techniques to speed up the task of labelling the documents.