Abstract: The adaptation capability to a wide range of domains is crucial for scene text spotting models when deployed to real-world conditions. However, existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches usually incorporate scene text detection and recognition simply by pretraining on natural scene text datasets, which do not directly exploit the intermediate feature representations between multiple domains. Here, we investigate the problem of domain-adaptive scene text spotting, i.e., training a model on multi-domain source data such that it can directly adapt to target domains rather than being specialized for a specific domain or scenario. Further, we investigate a transformer baseline called Swin-TESTR to focus on solving scene-text spotting for both regular and arbitrary-shaped scene text along with an exhaustive evaluation. The results clearly demonstrate the potential of intermediate representations to achieve significant performance on text spotting benchmarks across multiple domains (e.g. language, synth-to-real, and documents). both in terms of accuracy and efficiency.

Abstract: Object detection in documents is a key step to automate the structural elements identification process in a digital or scanned document through understanding the hierarchical structure and relationships between different elements. Large and complex models, while achieving high accuracy, can be computationally expensive and memory-intensive, making them impractical for deployment on resource constrained devices. Knowledge distillation allows us to create small and more efficient models that retain much of the performance of their larger counterparts. Here we present a graph-based knowledge distillation framework to correctly identify and localize the document objects in a document image. Here, we design a structured graph with nodes containing proposal-level features and edges representing the relationship between the different proposal regions. Also, to reduce text bias an adaptive node sampling strategy is designed to prune the weight distribution and put more weightage on non-text nodes. We encode the complete graph as a knowledge representation and transfer it from the teacher to the student through the proposed distillation loss by effectively capturing both local and global information concurrently. Extensive experimentation on competitive benchmarks demonstrates that the proposed framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches. The code will be available at: this https URL.

Abstract: Historical cryptology studies (original) encrypted manuscripts, often handwritten sources, produced in our history. These historical sources can be found in archives, often hidden without any indexing and therefore hard to locate. Once found they need to be digitized and turned into a machine-readable text format before they can be deciphered with computational methods. The focus of historical cryptology is not primarily the development of sophisticated algorithms for decipherment, but rather the entire process of analysis of the encrypted source from collection and digitization to transcription and decryption. The process also includes the interpretation and contextualization of the message set in its historical context. There are many challenges on the way, such as mistakes made by the scribe, errors made by the transcriber, damaged pages, handwriting styles that are difficult to interpret, historical languages from various time periods, and hidden underlying language of the message. Ciphertexts vary greatly in terms of their code system and symbol sets used with more or less distinguishable symbols. Ciphertexts can be embedded in clearly written text, or shorter or longer sequences of cleartext can be embedded in the ciphertext. The ciphers used mostly in historical times are substitutions (simple, homophonic, or polyphonic), with or without nomenclatures, encoded as digits or symbol sequences, with or without spaces. So the circumstances are different from those in modern cryptography which focuses on methods (algorithms) and their strengths and assumes that the algorithm is applied correctly. For both historical and modern cryptology, attack vectors outside the algorithm are applied like implementation flaws and side-channel attacks. In this chapter, we give an introduction to the field of historical cryptology and present an overview of how researchers today process historical encrypted sources.

Abstract: The emergence of transformer models like BERT, GPT-2, GPT-3, RoBERTa, T5 for natural language understanding tasks has opened the floodgates towards solving a wide array of machine learning tasks in other modalities like images, audio, music, sketches and so on. These language models are domain-agnostic and as a result could be applied to 1-D sequences of any kind. However, the key challenge lies in bridging the modality gap so that they could generate strong features beneficial for out-of-domain tasks. This work focuses on leveraging the power of such pre-trained language models and discusses the challenges in predicting challenging handwritten symbols and alphabets.

Abstract: Instance-level segmentation of documents consists in assigning a class-aware and instance-aware label to each pixel of the image. It is a key step in document parsing for their understanding. In this paper, we present a unified transformer encoder-decoder architecture for en-to-end instance segmentation of complex layouts in document images. The method adapts a contrastive training with a mixed query selection for anchor initialization in the decoder. Later on, it performs a dot product between the obtained query embeddings and the pixel embedding map (coming from the encoder) for semantic reasoning. Extensive experimentation on competitive benchmarks like PubLayNet, PRIMA, Historical Japanese (HJ), and TableBank demonstrate that our model with SwinL backbone achieves better segmentation performance than the existing state-of-the-art approaches with the average precision of 93.72, 54.39, 84.65 and 98.04 respectively under one billion parameters. The code is made publicly available at: github.com/ayanban011/SwinDocSegmenter .