Abstract: Historical records of daily activities provide intriguing insights into the life of our ancestors, useful for demography studies and genealogical research. Automatic processing of historical documents, however, has mostly been focused on single works of literature and less on social records, which tend to have a distinct layout, structure, and vocabulary. Such information is usually collected by expert demographers that devote a lot of time to manually transcribe them. This paper presents a new database, compiled from a marriage license books collection, to support research in automatic handwriting recognition for historical documents containing social records. Marriage license books are documents that were used for centuries by ecclesiastical institutions to register marriage licenses. Books from this collection are handwritten and span nearly half a millennium until the beginning of the 20th century. In addition, a study is presented about the capability of state-of-the-art handwritten text recognition systems, when applied to the presented database. Baseline results are reported for reference in future studies.

Abstract: Graph-based representations are of broad use and applicability in pattern recognition. They exhibit, however, a major drawback with regards to the processing tools that are available in their domain. Graphembedding into vectorspaces is a growing field among the structural pattern recognition community which aims at providing a feature vector representation for every graph, and thus enables classical statistical learning machinery to be used on graph-based input patterns. In this work, we propose a novel embedding methodology for graphs with continuous nodeattributes and unattributed edges. The approach presented in this paper is based on statistics of the node labels and the edges between them, based on their similarity to a set of representatives. We specifically deal with an important issue of this methodology, namely, the selection of a suitable set of representatives. In an experimental evaluation, we empirically show the advantages of this novel approach in the context of different classification problems using several databases of graphs.

Abstract: Genetic Algorithms (GA) have been previously applied to Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) in state-of-the-art works in order to find a suitable coding matrix. Nevertheless, none of the presented techniques directly take into account the properties of the ECOC matrix. As a result the considered search space is unnecessarily large. In this paper, a novel Genetic strategy to optimize the ECOC coding step is presented. This novel strategy redefines the usual crossover and mutation operators in order to take into account the theoretical properties of the ECOC framework. Thus, it reduces the search space and lets the algorithm to converge faster. In addition, a novel operator that is able to enlarge the code in a smart way is introduced. The novel methodology is tested on several UCI datasets and four challenging computer vision problems. Furthermore, the analysis of the results done in terms of performance, code length and number of Support Vectors shows that the optimization process is able to find very efficient codes, in terms of the trade-off between classification performance and the number of classifiers. Finally, classification performance per dichotomizer results shows that the novel proposal is able to obtain similar or even better results while defining a more compact number of dichotomies and SVs compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Abstract: Structural pattern recognition approaches offer the most expressive, convenient, powerful but computational expensive representations of underlying relational information. To benefit from mature, less expensive and efficient state-of-the-art machine learning models of statistical pattern recognition they must be mapped to a low-dimensional vector space. Our method of explicit graph embedding bridges the gap between structural and statistical pattern recognition. We extract the topological, structural and attribute information from a graph and encode numeric details by fuzzy histograms and symbolic details by crisp histograms. The histograms are concatenated to achieve a simple and straightforward embedding of graph into a low-dimensional numeric feature vector. Experimentation on standard public graph datasets shows that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods of graph embedding for richly attributed graphs.

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to revisit an old theory of texture perception and
update its computational implementation by extending it to colour. With this in mind we try to capture the optimality of perceptual systems. This is achieved in the proposed approach by sharing well-known early stages of the visual processes and extracting low-dimensional features that perfectly encode adequate properties for a large variety of textures without needing further learning stages. We propose several descriptors in a bag-of-words framework that are derived from different quantisation models on to the feature spaces. Our perceptual features are directly given by the shape and colour attributes of image blobs, which are the textons. In this way we avoid learning visual words and directly build the vocabularies on these lowdimensionaltexton spaces. Main differences between proposed descriptors rely on how co-occurrence of blob attributes is represented in the vocabularies. Our approach overcomes current state-of-art in colour texture description which is proved in several experiments on large texture datasets.

Abstract: In this work, a new one-class classification ensemble strategy called approximate polytope ensemble is presented. The main contribution of the paper is threefold. First, the geometrical concept of convex hull is used to define the boundary of the target class defining the problem. Expansions and contractions of this geometrical structure are introduced in order to avoid over-fitting. Second, the decision whether a point belongs to the convex hull model in high dimensional spaces is approximated by means of random projections and an ensemble decision process. Finally, a tiling strategy is proposed in order to model non-convex structures. Experimental results show that the proposed strategy is significantly better than state of the art one-class classification methods on over 200 datasets.

Abstract: In this paper we propose an unsupervised segmentation-free method for word spotting in document images. Documents are represented with a grid of HOG descriptors, and a sliding-window approach is used to locate the document regions that are most similar to the query. We use the Exemplar SVM framework to produce a better representation of the query in an unsupervised way. Then, we use a more discriminative representation based on Fisher Vector to rerank the best regions retrieved, and the most promising ones are used to expand the Exemplar SVM training set and improve the query representation. Finally, the document descriptors are precomputed and compressed with Product Quantization. This offers two advantages: first, a large number of documents can be kept in RAM memory at the same time. Second, the sliding window becomes significantly faster since distances between quantized HOG descriptors can be precomputed. Our results significantly outperform other segmentation-free methods in the literature, both in accuracy and in speed and memory usage.