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Mohamed Ali Souibgui, Alicia Fornes, Yousri Kessentini, & Beata Megyesi. (2022). Few shots are all you need: A progressive learning approach for low resource handwritten text recognition. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 160, 43–49.
Abstract: Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a few-shot learning-based handwriting recognition approach that significantly reduces the human annotation process, by requiring only a few images of each alphabet symbols. The method consists of detecting all the symbols of a given alphabet in a textline image and decoding the obtained similarity scores to the final sequence of transcribed symbols. Our model is first pretrained on synthetic line images generated from an alphabet, which could differ from the alphabet of the target domain. A second training step is then applied to reduce the gap between the source and the target data. Since this retraining would require annotation of thousands of handwritten symbols together with their bounding boxes, we propose to avoid such human effort through an unsupervised progressive learning approach that automatically assigns pseudo-labels to the unlabeled data. The evaluation on different datasets shows that our model can lead to competitive results with a significant reduction in human effort. The code will be publicly available in the following repository: https://github.com/dali92002/HTRbyMatching
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Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora, Alicia Fornes, Oriol Ramos Terrades, Josep Llados, Jialuo Chen, Miquel Valls-Figols, et al. (2022). The Barcelona Historical Marriage Database and the Baix Llobregat Demographic Database. From Algorithms for Handwriting Recognition to Individual-Level Demographic and Socioeconomic Data. HLCS - Historical Life Course Studies, 99–132.
Abstract: The Barcelona Historical Marriage Database (BHMD) gathers records of the more than 600,000 marriages celebrated in the Diocese of Barcelona and their taxation registered in Barcelona Cathedral's so-called Marriage Licenses Books for the long period 1451–1905 and the BALL Demographic Database brings together the individual information recorded in the population registers, censuses and fiscal censuses of the main municipalities of the county of Baix Llobregat (Barcelona). In this ongoing collection 263,786 individual observations have been assembled, dating from the period between 1828 and 1965 by December 2020. The two databases started as part of different interdisciplinary research projects at the crossroads of Historical Demography and Computer Vision. Their construction uses artificial intelligence and computer vision methods as Handwriting Recognition to reduce the time of execution. However, its current state still requires some human intervention which explains the implemented crowdsourcing and game sourcing experiences. Moreover, knowledge graph techniques have allowed the application of advanced record linkage to link the same individuals and families across time and space. Moreover, we will discuss the main research lines using both databases developed so far in historical demography.
Keywords: Individual demographic databases; Computer vision, Record linkage; Social mobility; Inequality; Migration; Word spotting; Handwriting recognition; Local censuses; Marriage Licences
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Ruben Tito, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Ernest Valveny. (2023). Hierarchical multimodal transformers for Multi-Page DocVQA. PR - Pattern Recognition, 144, 109834.
Abstract: Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) refers to the task of answering questions from document images. Existing work on DocVQA only considers single-page documents. However, in real scenarios documents are mostly composed of multiple pages that should be processed altogether. In this work we extend DocVQA to the multi-page scenario. For that, we first create a new dataset, MP-DocVQA, where questions are posed over multi-page documents instead of single pages. Second, we propose a new hierarchical method, Hi-VT5, based on the T5 architecture, that overcomes the limitations of current methods to process long multi-page documents. The proposed method is based on a hierarchical transformer architecture where the encoder summarizes the most relevant information of every page and then, the decoder takes this summarized information to generate the final answer. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that our method is able, in a single stage, to answer the questions and provide the page that contains the relevant information to find the answer, which can be used as a kind of explainability measure.
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Souhail Bakkali, Zuheng Ming, Mickael Coustaty, Marçal Rusiñol, & Oriol Ramos Terrades. (2023). VLCDoC: Vision-Language Contrastive Pre-Training Model for Cross-Modal Document Classification. PR - Pattern Recognition, 139, 109419.
Abstract: Multimodal learning from document data has achieved great success lately as it allows to pre-train semantically meaningful features as a prior into a learnable downstream approach. In this paper, we approach the document classification problem by learning cross-modal representations through language and vision cues, considering intra- and inter-modality relationships. Instead of merging features from different modalities into a common representation space, the proposed method exploits high-level interactions and learns relevant semantic information from effective attention flows within and across modalities. The proposed learning objective is devised between intra- and inter-modality alignment tasks, where the similarity distribution per task is computed by contracting positive sample pairs while simultaneously contrasting negative ones in the common feature representation space}. Extensive experiments on public document classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and the generalization capacity of our model on both low-scale and large-scale datasets.
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Ayan Banerjee, Sanket Biswas, Josep Llados, & Umapada Pal. (2024). SemiDocSeg: Harnessing Semi-Supervised Learning for Document Layout Analysis. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, .
Abstract: Document Layout Analysis (DLA) is the process of automatically identifying and categorizing the structural components (e.g. Text, Figure, Table, etc.) within a document to extract meaningful content and establish the page's layout structure. It is a crucial stage in document parsing, contributing to their comprehension. However, traditional DLA approaches often demand a significant volume of labeled training data, and the labor-intensive task of generating high-quality annotated training data poses a substantial challenge. In order to address this challenge, we proposed a semi-supervised setting that aims to perform learning on limited annotated categories by eliminating exhaustive and expensive mask annotations. The proposed setting is expected to be generalizable to novel categories as it learns the underlying positional information through a support set and class information through Co-Occurrence that can be generalized from annotated categories to novel categories. Here, we first extract features from the input image and support set with a shared multi-scale feature acquisition backbone. Then, the extracted feature representation is fed to the transformer encoder as a query. Later on, we utilize a semantic embedding network before the decoder to capture the underlying semantic relationships and similarities between different instances, enabling the model to make accurate predictions or classifications with only a limited amount of labeled data. Extensive experimentation on competitive benchmarks like PRIMA, DocLayNet, and Historical Japanese (HJ) demonstrate that this generalized setup obtains significant performance compared to the conventional supervised approach.
Keywords: Document layout analysis; Semi-supervised learning; Co-Occurrence matrix; Instance segmentation; Swin transformer
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