Gemma Sánchez

Symbol Recognition: Current Advances and Perspectives

The recognition of symbols in graphic documents is an intensive research activity in the community of pattern recognition and document analysis. A key issue in the interpretation of maps, engineering drawings, diagrams, etc. is the recognition of domain dependent symbols according to a symbol database. In this work we first review the most outstanding symbol recognition methods from two different points of view: application domains and pattern recognition methods. In the second part of the paper, open and unaddressed problems involved in symbol recognition are described, analyzing their current state of art and discussing future research challenges. Thus, issues such as symbol representation, matching, segmentation, learning, scalability of recognition methods and performance evaluation are addressed in this work. Finally, we discuss the perspectives of symbol recognition concerning to new paradigms such as user interfaces in handheld computers or document database and WWW indexing by graphical content.

Blurred Shape Model for binary and grey-level symbol recognition

Many symbol recognition problems require the use of robust descriptors in order to obtain rich information of the data. However, the research of a good descriptor is still an open issue due to the high variability of symbols appearance. Rotation, partial occlusions, elastic deformations, intra-class and inter-class variations, or high variability among symbols due to different writing styles, are just a few problems. In this paper, we introduce a symbol shape description to deal with the changes in appearance that these types of symbols suffer. The shape of the symbol is aligned based on principal components to make the recognition invariant to rotation and reflection. Then, we present the Blurred Shape Model descriptor (BSM), where new features encode the probability of appearance of each pixel that outlines the symbols shape. Moreover, we include the new descriptor in a system to deal with multi-class symbol categorization problems. Adaboost is used to train the binary classifiers, learning the BSM features that better split symbol classes. Then, the binary problems are embedded in an Error-Correcting Output Codes framework (ECOC) to deal with the multi-class case. The methodology is evaluated on different synthetic and real data sets. State-of-the-art descriptors and classifiers are compared, showing the robustness and better performance of the present scheme to classify symbols with high variability of appearance.

Writer Identification in Old Handwritten Music Scores

The aim of writer identification is determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of writers. In this paper we present a system for writer identification in old handwritten music scores. Even though an important amount of compositions contains handwritten text in the music scores, the aim of our work is to use only music notation to determine the author. The steps of the system proposed are the following. First of all, the music sheet is preprocessed and normalized for obtaining a single binarized music line, without the staff lines. Afterwards, 100 features are extracted for every music line, which are subsequently used in a k-NN classifier that compares every feature vector with prototypes stored in a database. By applying feature selection and extraction methods on the original feature set, the performance is increased. The proposed method has been tested on a database of old music scores from the 17th to 19th centuries, achieving a recognition rate of about 95%.

A similarity measure between vector sequences with application to handwritten word image retrieval

This article proposes a novel similarity measure between vector sequences. Recently, a model-based approach was introduced to address this issue. It consists in modeling each sequence with a continuous Hidden Markov Model (CHMM) and computing a probabilistic measure of similarity between C-HMMs. In this paper we propose to model sequences with semi-continuous HMMs (SC-HMMs): the Gaussians of the SC-HMMs are constrained to belong to a shared pool of Gaussians. This constraint provides two major benefits. First, the a priori information contained in the common set of Gaussians leads to a more accurate estimate of the HMM parameters. Second, the computation of a probabilistic similarity between two SC-HMMs can be simplified to a Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) between their mixture weight vectors, which reduces significantly the computational cost. Experimental results on a handwritten word retrieval task show that the proposed similarity outperforms the traditional DTW between the original sequences, and the model-based approach which uses C-HMMs. We also show that this increase in accuracy can be traded against a significant reduction of the computational cost (up to 100 times).

On the Use of Textural Features for Writer Identification in Old Handwritten Music Scores

Writer identification consists in determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of writers. In this paper we present a system for writer identification in old handwritten music scores which uses only music notation to determine the author. The steps of the proposed system are the following. First of all, the music sheet is preprocessed for obtaining a music score without the staff lines. Afterwards, four different methods for generating texture images from music symbols are applied. Every approach uses a different spatial variation when combining the music symbols to generate the textures. Finally, Gabor filters and Grey-scale Co-ocurrence matrices are used to obtain the features. The classification is performed using a k-NN classifier based on Euclidean distance. The proposed method has been tested on a database of old music scores from the 17th to 19th centuries, achieving encouraging identification rates.

An Incremental On-line Parsing Algorithm for Recognizing Sketching Diagrams

This paper presents a syntactic recognition approach for on-line drawn graphical symbols. The proposed method consists in an incremental on-line predictive parser based on symbol descriptions by an adjacency grammar. The parser analyzes input strokes as they are drawn by the user and is able to get ahead which symbols are likely to be recognized when a partial subshape is drawn in an intermediate state. In addition, the parser takes into account two issues. First, symbol strokes are drawn in any order by the user and second, since it is an on-line framework, the system requires real-time response. The method has been applied to an on-line sketching interface for architectural symbols.

Indexing Historical Documents by Word Shape Signatures

In this paper a word spotting approach to index archival image documents is presented. Indices are constructed from keyword images. The spotting strategy is formulated on an indexing-by-shape basis. The well known shape context descriptor is used to compute word image signatures from the skeleton points. Afterwards, codewords are extracted from thresholded shape contexts. It is a simpler and more compact representation based on bit vectors. Document images are roughly segmented into words and a lookup table is constructed. Each word subimage is taken as a bin. Keyword images are spotted into documents by a voting strategy consisting in indexing into the lookup table by codewords, and voting into the corresponding bins. The approach is illustrated by a real application scenario consisting of documents from a digital archive of the Spanish Civil War.

A mean string algorithm to compute the average among a set of 2D shapes

An algorithm to compute the mean shape, when the shape is represented by a string, is presented as a modification of the well-known string edit algorithm. Given N strings of symbols, a string edit sequence defines a mapping between their corresponding symbols. We transform these sets of mapped symbols (edges) into piecewise linear functions and we compute their mean. To transform them into functions, we use the equation of the line defining their edges, and the percentage of their length, in order to have a common parameterization. The algorithm has been experimentally tested in the computation of a representative among a class of shapes in a clustering procedure in the domain of a graphics recognition application.

Symbol spotting in vectorized technical drawings through a lookup table of region strings

In this paper, we address the problem of symbol spotting in technical document images applied to scanned and vectorized line drawings. Like any information spotting architecture, our approach has two components. First, symbols are decomposed in primitives which are compactly represented and second a primitive indexing structure aims to efficiently retrieve similar primitives. Primitives are encoded in terms of attributed strings representing closed regions. Similar strings are clustered in a lookup table so that the set median strings act as indexing keys. A voting scheme formulates hypothesis in certain locations of the line drawing image where there is a high presence of regions similar to the queried ones, and therefore, a high probability to find the queried graphical symbol. The proposed approach is illustrated in a framework consisting in spotting furniture symbols in architectural drawings. It has been proved to work even in the presence of noise and distortion introduced by the scanning and raster-to-vector processes.

GRAPH MATCHING VERSUS GRAPH PARSING IN GRAPHICS RECOGNITION — A COMBINED APPROACH

Symbol recognition is a well-known challenge in the field of graphics recognition. Due to the representational power of graph structures, a number of graph-based approaches are used to answer whether a known symbol appears in a document and under which degree of confidence. In this paper, we review the particularities of graph structures representing technical drawings and we classify them in two categories, depending on whether the structure that they represent consists of prototype patterns or repetitive patterns. The recognition is then formulated in terms of graph matching or graph parsing, respectively. Since some symbols consist of two types of structures, the main contribution of this work is to propose a combined strategy. In addition, the combination of graph matching and graph parsing processes is based on a common graph structure that also involves a graph indexing mechanism. Graph nodes are classified in equivalence classes depending on their local configuration. Graph matching indexes in such equivalence classes using the information of model graph nodes as local descriptors, and then global consistency is checked using the graph edge attributes. On the other hand, representatives of equivalence classes are used as tokens of a graph grammar that guides a parsing process to recognize repetitive structures.