Symbol Spotting in Digital Libraries: Focused Retrieval over Graphic-rich Document Collections

Pattern recognition basically deals with the recognition of patterns, shapes, objects, things in images. Document image analysis was one of the very first applications of pattern recognition and even of computing. But until the 1980s, research in this field was mainly dealing with text-based documents, including OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and page layout analysis. Only a few people were looking at more specific documents such as music sheet, bank cheques or forms. The community of ...