Spotting symbols in line drawing images using graph representations

Abstract

Many methods of graphics recognition have been developed throughout the years for the recognition of pre-segmented graphics symbols but very few techniques achieved the objective of symbol spotting and recognition together in a generic case. To go one step forward through this objective, this paper presents an original solution for symbol spotting using a graph represen-tation of graphical documents. The proposed strategy has two main step. In the first step, a graph based representation of a document image is generated that includes selection of description primitives (nodes of the graph) and organisation of these features (edges). In the second step the graph is used to spot interesting parts of the image that potentially correspond to symbols. The sub-graphs associated to selected zones are then submitted to a graph matching algorithm in order to take the final decision and to recognize the class of the symbol. The experimental results obtained on different types of documents demonstrates that the system can handle different types of images without any modification. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.