Abstract. In this paper, we propose a new approach for symbol recognition using structural signatures and a Galois Lattice as classifier. The structural signatures are based on topological graphs computed from segments which are extracted from the symbol images by using an adapted Hough transform. These structural signatures, which can be seen as dynamic paths which carry high level information, are robust towards various transformations. They are classified by using a Galois Lattice as a classifier. The performances of the proposed approach are evaluated on the GREC03 symbol database and the experimental results we obtain are encouraging.