Capturing Shape and Text for Retrieval

We present a system for content-based retrieval of line drawings. Line drawings are schematic diagrams consisting of two kinds of information, text and graphics. The textual part is indexed from the results of word recognition. The indexing for the graphic content uses no a-priori knowledge about the content of a drawing and depends only on features derived from the shape of graphic structures. The indexing scheme is used in a vector based information retrieval system. Results and problems in evaluating such a system are discussed.