Segmentation and classification of hand-drawn pictogram in cluttered scenes-an integrated approach

In this paper, a new approach to identification of handwritten symbols in arbitrary complex environments is presented. 20 different pictograms drawn in different backgrounds can be identified with a recognition accuracy of 90%. In order to perform this challenging task, we use pattern spotting techniques based on pseudo 2-D Hidden Markov Models (P2DHMMs). Practical applications of our approach can be found in many typical mulitmedia document processing tasks, such as localization and recognition of non-rigid objects in image databases, detection of objects in complex scenes, finding trademarks in presence of clutter within videos, processing distorted document images in digital libraries, or content-based image retrieval based on handwritten query symbols.