Andres Mafla, Ruben Tito, Sounak Dey, Lluis Gomez, Marçal Rusiñol, Ernest Valveny, et al. (2021). Real-time Lexicon-free Scene Text Retrieval. PR - Pattern Recognition, 110, 107656.
Abstract: In this work, we address the task of scene text retrieval: given a text query, the system returns all images containing the queried text. The proposed model uses a single shot CNN architecture that predicts bounding boxes and builds a compact representation of spotted words. In this way, this problem can be modeled as a nearest neighbor search of the textual representation of a query over the outputs of the CNN collected from the totality of an image database. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms previous state-of-the-art, while offering a significant increase in processing speed and unmatched expressiveness with samples never seen at training time. Several experiments to assess the generalization capability of the model are conducted in a multilingual dataset, as well as an application of real-time text spotting in videos.
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Lei Kang, Pau Riba, Marçal Rusiñol, Alicia Fornes, & Mauricio Villegas. (2022). Pay Attention to What You Read: Non-recurrent Handwritten Text-Line Recognition. PR - Pattern Recognition, 129, 108766.
Abstract: The advent of recurrent neural networks for handwriting recognition marked an important milestone reaching impressive recognition accuracies despite the great variability that we observe across different writing styles. Sequential architectures are a perfect fit to model text lines, not only because of the inherent temporal aspect of text, but also to learn probability distributions over sequences of characters and words. However, using such recurrent paradigms comes at a cost at training stage, since their sequential pipelines prevent parallelization. In this work, we introduce a non-recurrent approach to recognize handwritten text by the use of transformer models. We propose a novel method that bypasses any recurrence. By using multi-head self-attention layers both at the visual and textual stages, we are able to tackle character recognition as well as to learn language-related dependencies of the character sequences to be decoded. Our model is unconstrained to any predefined vocabulary, being able to recognize out-of-vocabulary words, i.e. words that do not appear in the training vocabulary. We significantly advance over prior art and demonstrate that satisfactory recognition accuracies are yielded even in few-shot learning scenarios.
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Pau Riba, Andreas Fischer, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2021). Learning graph edit distance by graph neural networks. PR - Pattern Recognition, 120, 108132.
Abstract: The emergence of geometric deep learning as a novel framework to deal with graph-based representations has faded away traditional approaches in favor of completely new methodologies. In this paper, we propose a new framework able to combine the advances on deep metric learning with traditional approximations of the graph edit distance. Hence, we propose an efficient graph distance based on the novel field of geometric deep learning. Our method employs a message passing neural network to capture the graph structure, and thus, leveraging this information for its use on a distance computation. The performance of the proposed graph distance is validated on two different scenarios. On the one hand, in a graph retrieval of handwritten words i.e. keyword spotting, showing its superior performance when compared with (approximate) graph edit distance benchmarks. On the other hand, demonstrating competitive results for graph similarity learning when compared with the current state-of-the-art on a recent benchmark dataset.
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S.K. Jemni, Mohamed Ali Souibgui, Yousri Kessentini, & Alicia Fornes. (2022). Enhance to Read Better: A Multi-Task Adversarial Network for Handwritten Document Image Enhancement. PR - Pattern Recognition, 123, 108370.
Abstract: Handwritten document images can be highly affected by degradation for different reasons: Paper ageing, daily-life scenarios (wrinkles, dust, etc.), bad scanning process and so on. These artifacts raise many readability issues for current Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) algorithms and severely devalue their efficiency. In this paper, we propose an end to end architecture based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to recover the degraded documents into a and form. Unlike the most well-known document binarization methods, which try to improve the visual quality of the degraded document, the proposed architecture integrates a handwritten text recognizer that promotes the generated document image to be more readable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use the text information while binarizing handwritten documents. Extensive experiments conducted on degraded Arabic and Latin handwritten documents demonstrate the usefulness of integrating the recognizer within the GAN architecture, which improves both the visual quality and the readability of the degraded document images. Moreover, we outperform the state of the art in H-DIBCO challenges, after fine tuning our pre-trained model with synthetically degraded Latin handwritten images, on this task.
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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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Ruben Tito, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Ernest Valveny. (2023). Hierarchical multimodal transformers for Multipage DocVQA. PR - Pattern Recognition, 144(109834).
Abstract: Existing work on DocVQA only considers single-page documents. However, in real applications documents are mostly composed of multiple pages that should be processed altogether. In this work, we propose a new multimodal hierarchical method Hi-VT5, that overcomes the limitations of current methods to process long multipage documents. In contrast to previous hierarchical methods that focus on different semantic granularity (He et al., 2021) or different subtasks (Zhou et al., 2022) used in image classification. Our method is a hierarchical transformer architecture where the encoder learns to summarize the most relevant information of every page and then, the decoder uses this summarized representation to generate the final answer, following a bottom-up approach. Moreover, due to the lack of multipage DocVQA datasets, we also introduce MP-DocVQA, an extension of SP-DocVQA where questions are posed over multipage documents instead of single pages. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that Hi-VT5 is able, in a single stage, to answer the questions and provide the page that contains the answer, which can be used as a kind of explainability measure.
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Parichehr Behjati, Pau Rodriguez, Carles Fernandez, Isabelle Hupont, Armin Mehri, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2023). Single image super-resolution based on directional variance attention network. PR - Pattern Recognition, 133, 108997.
Abstract: Recent advances in single image super-resolution (SISR) explore the power of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to achieve better performance. However, most of the progress has been made by scaling CNN architectures, which usually raise computational demands and memory consumption. This makes modern architectures less applicable in practice. In addition, most CNN-based SR methods do not fully utilize the informative hierarchical features that are helpful for final image recovery. In order to address these issues, we propose a directional variance attention network (DiVANet), a computationally efficient yet accurate network for SISR. Specifically, we introduce a novel directional variance attention (DiVA) mechanism to capture long-range spatial dependencies and exploit inter-channel dependencies simultaneously for more discriminative representations. Furthermore, we propose a residual attention feature group (RAFG) for parallelizing attention and residual block computation. The output of each residual block is linearly fused at the RAFG output to provide access to the whole feature hierarchy. In parallel, DiVA extracts most relevant features from the network for improving the final output and preventing information loss along the successive operations inside the network. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of DiVANet over the state of the art in several datasets, while maintaining relatively low computation and memory footprint. The code is available at https://github.com/pbehjatii/DiVANet.
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Xavier Soria, Angel Sappa, Patricio Humanante, & Arash Akbarinia. (2023). Dense extreme inception network for edge detection. PR - Pattern Recognition, 139, 109461.
Abstract: Edge detection is the basis of many computer vision applications. State of the art predominantly relies on deep learning with two decisive factors: dataset content and network architecture. Most of the publicly available datasets are not curated for edge detection tasks. Here, we address this limitation. First, we argue that edges, contours and boundaries, despite their overlaps, are three distinct visual features requiring separate benchmark datasets. To this end, we present a new dataset of edges. Second, we propose a novel architecture, termed Dense Extreme Inception Network for Edge Detection (DexiNed), that can be trained from scratch without any pre-trained weights. DexiNed outperforms other algorithms in the presented dataset. It also generalizes well to other datasets without any fine-tuning. The higher quality of DexiNed is also perceptually evident thanks to the sharper and finer edges it outputs.
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A. Pujol, Jordi Vitria, Felipe Lumbreras, & Juan J. Villanueva. (2001). Topological principal component analysis for face encoding and recognition. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 22(6-7), 769–776.
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Gemma Sanchez, Josep Llados, & K. Tombre. (2002). A mean string algorithm to compute the average among a set of 2D shapes. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 23(1-3), 203–214.
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A. Martinez, & Jordi Vitria. (2000). Learning mixture models using a genetic version of the EM algorithm. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 21(8), 759–769.
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M. Bressan, & Jordi Vitria. (2003). Nonparametric Discriminant Analysis and Nearest Neighbor Classification. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 24(15), 2743–2749.
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Cristina Cañero, & Petia Radeva. (2003). Vesselness enhancement diffusion. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 24(16), 3141–3151.
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David Guillamet, & Jordi Vitria. (2003). Evaluation of distance metrics for recognition based on non-negative matrix factorization. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 24(9-10), 1599 –1605.
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