Near-duplicate document image matching: A graphical perspective

•We propose a near-duplicate document image matching approach.•Document images are represented by graphs.•The nodes correspond to the objects in the images.•The edges capture the relations among the objects.•A multi-granularity object tree is built to settle the instability of object segmentation.

A near-duplicate document image matching approach characterized by a graphical perspective is proposed in this paper. Document images are represented by graphs whose nodes correspond to the objects in the images. Consequently, the image matching problem is then converted to graph matching. To deal with the instability of object segmentation, a multi-granularity object tree is constructed for a document image. Each level in the tree corresponds to one possible object segmentation, while different levels are characterized by various object granularities. Some graphs can be generated from the tree and the objects associated with each graph may be of different granularities. Two graphs with the maximum similarity are found from the multi-granularity object trees of the two near-duplicate document images which are to be matched. The encouraging experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach.