Diagram Recognition: Domain Knowledge Based Approach

Information has become a very important resource of any organization and a great demand exists for speedily inputting the colossal amount of printed and handwritten information present on documents into the computer, which requires a lot of manual labour. Over the past few decades, electronic document management systems have turned out to be "beneficial to" and "popular in" the society. Profound research and development has been done in this field. Automatic pattern analysis & recognition systems have been & are being developed to analyze the contents of the documents. An important stage in this procedure is the automatic recognition of diagrams from the document. Diagram recognition being one of the main areas in the field of document analysis & pattern recognition is still an open area for researchers. Diagram recognition is a trivial task for humans, but the development of its computer based solution is tremendously difficult. Various subject-specific methods have been developed. In this paper, we present a novel cognitive approach for the recognition of offline typeset/machine-drawn diagrams by the identification of its symbols. The focus here is to use minimal amount of data for the purpose of recognition and to provide a general system for recognition of various types of diagrams. This involves the development of a Recognition Domain Knowledge Kernel. The algorithm proposed is independent of the size of the symbol used in the diagram. Based on the type of symbols present in the diagram, a diagram classification is made.