Extraction of Contextual Information Existing among Component Elements of Origami Books

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel approach for extracting element clusters, associated with individual folding steps of origami, from a page-image of origami drill books. Unlike the documents investigated in other researches, origami books are usually not designed under a specific layout structure. Our approach is based on a Voronoi expression schema. Since the only clue to group related elements is spatial proximity relations among the elements, we utilize Voronoi regions, which are generated by using the centroids of main elements as characteristic points of Voronoi diagrams, to estimate the scopes of element clusters. This method provides necessary information to a recognition system that converts a folding process, described by a series of illustrations, instructive sentences and special symbols, into a 3D animation. The experimental results with good accuracy show the effectiveness of the proposed method.