Efficient Circuit Diagram Retrieval via Graph Representation

In the field of electronic engineering, the retrieval of circuit diagrams has become an area of considerable research interest. This is attributed to the critical role it plays in consulting legacy electronic designs and in the identification of design plagiarism. Existing image retrieval techniques, which are proficient in managing natural images, typically involve the conversion of images into feature vectors and retrieve similar images according to the closeness of these vectors. However, these methods encounter limitations when adapted to the more specialized and complex domain of circuit diagrams. This paper introduces an innovative approach to the retrieval of circuit diagrams through the use of a graph representation of these diagrams. This novel approach effectively transforms the retrieval task into a graph retrieval problem. The methodology proposed in this paper is comprised of two main components: A recognition algorithm for circuit diagrams designed to accurately extract the components and the topological structure of the circuit and a retrieval strategy based on graph similarity. This methodology is pioneering in its use of graph representation for circuit diagram retrieval, incorporating topological features that are often not considered by conventional image retrieval methods. The experimental results presented in this paper validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.