This book contains refereed and improved papers presented at the 8th IAPR Workshop on Graphics Recognition (GREC 2009), held in La Rochelle, France, July 22-23, 2009. The GREC workshops provide an excellent opportunity for researchersand practitionersat all levels of experience to meet colleaguesand to share new ideas and knowledge about graphics recognition methods. Graphics recognition is a sub?eld of document image analysis that deals with graphical entities in engineering drawings, sketches, maps, architectural plans, musical scores, mathematical notation, tables, diagrams, etc. GREC 2009...

Pattern recognition basically deals with the recognition of patterns, shapes, objects, things in images. Document image analysis was one of the very ?rst applications of pattern recognition and even of computing. But until the 1980s, research in this ?eld was mainly dealing with text-based documents, including OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and page layout analysis. Only a few people were looking at more speci?c documents such as music sheet, bank cheques or forms. The community of graphics recognition became visible in the late 1980s. Their speci?c interest was to recognize high-level...