Sensors, Vol. 18, Pages 3403: A Combinatorial Solution to Point Symbol Recognition (Sensors)

Recent work has shown that recognizing point symbols is an essential task in the field of map digitization. For the identification of symbols, it is generally necessary to compare the symbols with a specific criterion and find the most similar one with each known symbol one by one. Most of the works can only identify a single symbol, a small number of works are to deal with multiple symbols simultaneously with a low recognition accuracy. Given the two deficiencies, this paper proposes a deep transfer learning architecture, where the task is to learn a symbol classifier with AlexNet. For the insufficient dataset, we develop a method for transfer learning that uses a MNIST dataset to pretrain the model, which makes up for the problem of small training dataset and enhances the generalization of the model. Before the recognition process, preprocessing the point symbols in the map to coarse screening out the areas suspected of point symbols. We show a significant improvement over using point symbol images to keep a high performance in being able to deal with many more categories of symbols simultaneously.