Structure analysis for plane geometry figures

Abstract

As there are increasing numbers of digital documents for education purpose, we realize that there is not a retrieval application for mathematic plane geometry images. In this paper, we propose a method for retrieving plane geometry figures (PGFs), which often appear in geometry books and digital documents. First, detecting algorithms are applied to detect common basic geometry shapes from a PGF image. Based on all basic shapes, we analyze the structural relationships between two basic shapes and combine some of them to a compound shape to build the PGF descriptor. Afterwards, we apply matching function to retrieve candidate PGF images with ranking. The great contribution of the paper is that we propose a structure analysis method to better describe the spatial relationships in such image composed of many overlapped shapes. Experimental results demonstrate that our analysis method and shape descriptor can obtain good retrieval results with relatively high effectiveness and efficiency.