Abstract: : Edge-based color constancy methods make use of image derivatives to estimate the illuminant. However, different edge types exist in real-world images such as material, shadow and highlight edges. These different edge types may have a distinctive influence on the performance of the illuminant estimation. Therefore, in this paper, an extensive analysis is provided of different edge types on the performance of edge-based color constancy methods. First, an edge-based taxonomy is presented classifying edge types based on their photometric properties (e.g. material, shadow-geometry and highlights). Then, a performance evaluation of edge-based color constancy is provided using these different edge types. From this performance evaluation it is derived that specular and shadow edge types are more valuable than material edges for the estimation of the illuminant. To this end, the (iterative) weighted Grey-Edge algorithm is proposed in which these edge types are more emphasized for the estimation of the illuminant. Images that are recorded under controlled circumstances demonstrate that the proposed iterative weighted Grey-Edge algorithm based on highlights reduces the median angular error with approximately $25\%$. In an uncontrolled environment, improvements in angular error up to $11\%$ are obtained with respect to regular edge-based color constancy.

Abstract: 0,624 JCR
Word spotting is the process of retrieving all instances of a queried keyword from a digital library of document images. In this paper we evaluate the performance of different word descriptors to assess the advantages and disadvantages of statistical and structural models in a framework of query-by-example word spotting in historical documents. We compare four word representation models, namely sequence alignment using DTW as a baseline reference, a bag of visual words approach as statistical model, a pseudo-structural model based on a Loci features representation, and a structural approach where words are represented by graphs. The four approaches have been tested with two collections of historical data: the George Washington database and the marriage records from the Barcelona Cathedral. We experimentally demonstrate that statistical representations generally give a better performance, however it cannot be neglected that large descriptors are difficult to be implemented in a retrieval scenario where word spotting requires the indexation of data with million word images.

Abstract: 0,405 JCR
In graphical documents (e.g., maps, engineering drawings), artistic documents etc., the text lines are annotated in multiple orientations or curvilinear way to illustrate different locations or symbols. For the optical character recognition of such documents, individual text lines from the documents need to be extracted. In this paper, we propose a novel method to segment such text lines and the method is based on the foreground and background information of the text components. To effectively utilize the background information, a water reservoir concept is used here. In the proposed scheme, at first, individual components are detected and grouped into character clusters in a hierarchical way using size and positional information. Next, the clusters are extended in two extreme sides to determine potential candidate regions. Finally, with the help of these candidate regions,
individual lines are extracted. The experimental results are presented on different datasets of graphical documents, camera-based warped documents, noisy images containing seals, etc. The results demonstrate that our approach is robust and invariant to size and orientation of the text lines present in
the document.