Image Mining for Patent Exploration

01.01.2012 - 30.04.2013
Forschungsförderungsprojekt
The constantly increasing number of yearly patent applications leads to an increased workload at the patent offices, raising the need for applications and systems that help the patent expert to faster evaluate an application. Up to now, all the software solutions for mining of patents use textual cues only. Hence, important information contained in patent drawings is inaccessible to automated analysis and retrieval. As a result drawings are sometimes misused to "hide" information and to trick full text search systems. Thus the complex task of manually analysing and comparing drawings is left to the expert, which in turn leads to high financial costs. This situation demands the development of innovative algorithms for the mining of patent images (e.g. information extraction, linking and image based search). This will help patent offices to cope with the ever increasing number of filings. To make the information buried in patent images accessible, the project will develop novel methods for: * automatic interlinking between patent text and drawing parts by sub-part segmentation and label identification, * efficient search for similar sub-parts of a drawing within a large scale patent database, * an interactive user-guided search with manual feedback provided by the patent expert. The developed techniques aim for application to a variety of technical drawings, such as flow charts, block diagrams, time charts and graph plots. Furthermore, the project will evaluate the proposed methods against a real life corpus of patents and patent images. They will be integrated in a prototype application to show their possibilities and benefits.

Personen

Projektleiter_in

Institut

Grant funds

  • FFG - Österr. Forschungsförderungs- gesellschaft mbH (National) Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)

Forschungsschwerpunkte

  • Media Informatics and Visual Computing: 60%
  • Business Informatics: 40%

Schlagwörter

DeutschEnglisch
Patentbilderpatent images
Bildanalyseimage analysis
Bildsucheimage search

Publikationen