Abstract: Mobile document image acquisition is a new trend raising serious issues in business document processing workflows. Such digitization procedure is unreliable, and integrates many distortions which must be detected as soon as possible, on the mobile, to avoid paying data transmission fees, and losing information due to the inability to re-capture later a document with temporary availability. In this context, out-of-focus blur is major issue: users have no direct control over it, and it seriously degrades OCR recognition. In this paper, we concentrate on the estimation of focus quality, to ensure a sufficient legibility of a document image for OCR processing. We propose two contributions to improve OCR accuracy prediction for mobile-captured document images. First, we present 24 focus measures, never tested on document images, which are fast to compute and require no training. Second, we show that a combination of those measures enables state-of-the art performance regarding the correlation with OCR accuracy. The resulting approach is fast, robust, and easy to implement in a mobile device. Experiments are performed on a public dataset, and precise details about image processing are given.

Abstract: Human segmentation in still images is a complex task due to the wide range of body poses and drastic changes in environmental conditions. Usually, human body segmentation is treated in a two-stage fashion. First, a human body part detection step is performed, and then, human part detections are used as prior knowledge to be optimized by segmentation strategies. In this paper, we present a two-stage scheme based on Multi-Scale Stacked Sequential Learning (MSSL). We define an extended feature set by stacking a multi-scale decomposition of body
part likelihood maps. These likelihood maps are obtained in a first stage
by means of a ECOC ensemble of soft body part detectors. In a second stage, contextual relations of part predictions are learnt by a binary classifier, obtaining an accurate body confidence map. The obtained confidence map is fed to a graph cut optimization procedure to obtain the final segmentation. Results show improved segmentation when MSSL is included in the human segmentation pipeline.

Abstract: This paper introduces a framework for evaluating the performance of information retrieval systems. Current evaluation metrics provide an average score that does not consider performance variability across the query set. In this manner, conclusions lack of any statistical significance, yielding poor inference to cases outside the query set and possibly unfair comparisons. We propose to apply statistical methods in order to obtain a more informative measure for problems in which different query classes can be identified. In this context, we assess the performance variability on two levels: overall variability across the whole query set and specific query class-related variability. To this end, we estimate confidence bands for precision-recall curves, and we apply ANOVA in order to assess the significance of the performance across different query classes.

Abstract: This paper presents an adaptive thresholding approach intended to increase the number of detected corners, while reducing the amount of those ones corresponding to noisy data. The proposed approach works by using the classical Harris corner detector algorithm and overcome the difficulty in finding a general threshold that work well for all the images in a given data set by proposing a novel adaptive thresholding scheme. Initially, two thresholds are used to discern between strong corners and flat regions. Then, a region based criteria is used to discriminate between weak corners and noisy points in the midway interval. Experimental results show that the proposed approach has a better capability to reject false corners and, at the same time, to detect weak ones. Comparisons with the state of the art are provided showing the validity of the proposed approach.

Abstract: Effective information retrieval on handwritten document images has always been
a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel handwritten word spotting approach based on graph representation. The presented model comprises both topological and morphological signatures of handwriting. Skeleton-based graphs with the Shape Context labeled vertexes are established for connected components. Each word image is represented as a sequence of graphs. In order to be robust to the handwriting variations, an exhaustive merging process based on DTW alignment results introduced in the similarity measure between word images. With respect to the computation complexity, an approximate graph edit distance approach using bipartite matching is employed for graph matching. The experiments on the George Washington dataset and the marriage records from the Barcelona Cathedral dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art structural methods.

Abstract: The first competition on music scores that was organized at ICDAR and GREC in 2011 awoke the interest of researchers, who participated in both staff removal and writer identification tasks. In this second edition, we focus on the staff removal task and simulate a real case scenario concerning old and degraded music scores. For this purpose, we have generated a new set of semi-synthetic images using two degradation models that we previously introduced: local noise and 3D distortions. In this extended paper we provide an extended description of the dataset, degradation models, evaluation metrics, the participant’s methods and the obtained results that could not be presented at ICDAR and GREC proceedings due to page limitations.

Abstract: Searching for text objects in real scene images is an open problem and a very active computer vision research area. A large number of methods have been proposed tackling the text search as extension of the ones from the document analysis field or inspired by general purpose object detection methods. However the general problem of object search in real scene images remains an extremely challenging problem due to the huge variability in object appearance. This thesis builds on top of the most recent findings in the visual attention literature presenting a novel computational model of eye guidance aiming to better describe text object search in real scene images.
First are presented the relevant state-of-the-art results from the visual attention literature regarding eye movements and visual search. Relevant models of attention are discussed and integrated with recent observations on the role of top-down constraints and the emerging need for a layered model of attention in which saliency is not the only factor guiding attention. Visual attention is then explained by the interaction of several modulating factors, such as objects, value, plans and saliency. Then we introduce our probabilistic formulation of attention deployment in real scene. The model is based on the rationale that oculomotor control depends on two interacting but distinct processes: an attentional process that assigns value to the sources of information and motor process that flexibly links information with action.
In such framework, the choice of where to look next is task-dependent and oriented to classes of objects embedded within pictures of complex scenes. The dependence on task is taken into account by exploiting the value and the reward of gazing at certain image patches or proto-objects that provide a sparse representation of the scene objects.
In the experimental section the model is tested in laboratory condition, comparing model simulations with data from eye tracking experiments. The comparison is qualitative in terms of observable scan paths and quantitative in terms of statistical similarity of gaze shift amplitude. Experiments are performed using eye tracking data from both a publicly available dataset of face and text and from newly performed eye-tracking experiments on a dataset of street view pictures containing text. The last part of this thesis is dedicated to study the extent to which the proposed model can account for human eye movements in a low constrained setting. We used a mobile eye tracking device and an ad-hoc developed methodology to compare model simulated eye data with the human eye data from mobile eye tracking recordings. Such setting allow to test the model in an incomplete visual information condition, reproducing a close to real-life search task.