Patent image retrieval: a survey

Drawings are an important component of patents, and many search tasks in the intellectual property domain rely on the comparison of patent drawings. In this paper, we begin with a review of algorithms developed for the automated retrieval of similar images in the patent domain. There is however a larger body of research dedicated to analysis and retrieval of images found in technical documents that is also applicable to the images found in patents. We present an overview of this research for technical drawings, diagrams, charts, plots and chemical structures. Finally, we discuss the evaluation of image retrieval for patents, including short descriptions of the new patent image evaluation tasks in the CLEF-IP and TREC-CHEM evaluation campaigns in 2011.