Layouts and sub-layouts constitute an important clue while searching a document on the basis of its structure, or when textual content is unknown irrelevant. A sub-layout specifies the arrangement of document entities within a smaller portion of the document. We propose an efficient graph-based matching algorithm, integrated with hash-based indexing, to prune a possibly large search space. A user can specify a combination of sub-layouts of interest using sketch-based queries. The system supports partial matching for unspecified layout entities. We handle cases of segmentation pre-processing errors (for text non-text blocks) with a symmetry maximization-based strategy, and accounting for multiple domain-specific plausible segmentation hypotheses. We show promising results of our system on a database of unstructured entities, containing 4776 newspaper images.
In this paper, we describe issues related to the measurement of structural similarity between document images. We define structural similarity, and discuss the benefits of using it as a complement to content similarity for querying document image databases. We present an approach to computing a geometrically invariant structural similarity, and use this measure to search document image databases. Our approach supports both full image matching using query by example (QBE) and sub-image matching using query by sketch (QBS). The similarity measure considers spatial and layout structure, and is computed by aggregating content area overlap measures with respect to their underlying column structures. These techniques are tested within the Intelligent Document Image Retrieval (IDIR) System, and results demonstrating effectiveness and efficiency of structure queries with respect to human relevance judgments are presented.