Geometric matching for clip-art drawing retrieval

Currently, there are large collections of clip-art vector drawings from which users can select the desired figures to insert in their documents. However, to locate a particular drawing among thousands is not easy. Although there are some solutions for drawing retrieval, almost all of them are designed to retrieve simple and not complex drawings as for instance clip-arts. In our prior work we proposed an approach to index and retrieve complex vector drawings by content, using topological and geometric information automatically extracted from figures. In this paper, we present a new algorithm to improve the geometric matching of two drawings, which takes into account the drawing as a whole and each of the shapes in it. We developed a web search engine for clip-art drawings, where we included this new technique. Experimental evaluation reveals that this new geometric matching algorithm conducts to better retrieval results than the prior matching solution.