Expansion of queries and databases for improving the retrieval accuracy of document portions: an application to a camera-pen system

This paper presents a method of improving the accuracy of document image retrieval focusing on the application to a camera-pen system. In a camera-pen system, document image retrieval is employed for locating the pen-tip position on a page. A serious problem is that since the camera is mounted close to the pen-tip, the camera captures only a tiny portion of the page and the resultant image is under severe perspective distortion, resulting in lowering the retrieval accuracy. To solve this problem, we propose new geometrically invariant features as well as expansion techniques which increase the number of index features of either the database or the query images. From the experimental results, it has been found that the query expansion technique with features by combining affine and perspective invariants allows us the best performance that improves the accuracy of a baseline method more than 27%.