Abstract: Effective information retrieval on handwritten document images has always been a challenging task, especially historical ones. In the paper, we propose a coarse-to-fine handwritten word spotting approach based on graph representation. The presented model comprises both the topological and morphological signatures of the handwriting. Skeleton-based graphs with the Shape Context labelled vertexes are established for connected components. Each word image is represented as a sequence of graphs. Aiming at developing a practical and efficient word spotting approach for large-scale historical handwritten documents, a fast and coarse comparison is first applied to prune the regions that are not similar to the query based on the graph embedding methodology. Afterwards, the query and regions of interest are compared by graph edit distance based on the Dynamic Time Warping alignment. The proposed approach is evaluated on a public dataset containing 50 pages of historical marriage license records. The results show that the proposed approach achieves a compromise between efficiency and accuracy.

Abstract: Since the document structure carries valuable discriminative information, plenty of efforts have been made for extracting and understanding document structure among which layout analysis approaches are the most commonly used. In this paper, Distance Transform based MSER (DTMSER) is employed to efficiently extract the document structure as a dendrogram of key-regions which roughly correspond to structural elements such as characters, words and paragraphs. Inspired by the Bag
of Words (BoW) framework, we propose an efficient method for structural document matching by representing the document image as a histogram of key-region pairs encoding structural relationships.
Applied to the scenario of document image retrieval, experimental results demonstrate a remarkable improvement when comparing the proposed method with typical BoW and pyramidal BoW methods.

Abstract: Staff removal is an important preprocessing step of the Optical Music Recognition (OMR). The process aims to remove the stafflines from a musical document and retain only the musical symbols, later these symbols are used effectively to identify the music information. This paper proposes a simple but robust method to remove stafflines from printed musical scores. In the proposed methodology we have considered a staffline segment as a horizontal linkage of vertical black runs with uniform height. We have used the neighbouring properties of a staffline segment to validate it as a true segment. We have considered the dataset along with the deformations described in for evaluation purpose. From experimentation we have got encouraging results.

Abstract: In this paper we present a method for the retrieval of images in terms of perceptual similarity. Local color information is added to the shape context descriptor in order to obtain an object description integrating both shape and color as visual cues. We use a color naming algorithm in order to represent the color information from a perceptual point of view. The proposed method has been tested in two different applications, an object retrieval scenario based on color sketch queries and a color trademark retrieval problem. Experimental results show that the addition of the color information significantly outperforms the sole use of the shape context descriptor.