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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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Arturo Fuentes, F. Javier Sanchez, Thomas Voncina, & Jorge Bernal. (2021). LAMV: Learning to Predict Where Spectators Look in Live Music Performances. In 16th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (Vol. 5, pp. 500–507).
Abstract: The advent of artificial intelligence has supposed an evolution on how different daily work tasks are performed. The analysis of cultural content has seen a huge boost by the development of computer-assisted methods that allows easy and transparent data access. In our case, we deal with the automation of the production of live shows, like music concerts, aiming to develop a system that can indicate the producer which camera to show based on what each of them is showing. In this context, we consider that is essential to understand where spectators look and what they are interested in so the computational method can learn from this information. The work that we present here shows the results of a first preliminary study in which we compare areas of interest defined by human beings and those indicated by an automatic system. Our system is based on the extraction of motion textures from dynamic Spatio-Temporal Volumes (STV) and then analyzing the patterns by means of texture analysis techniques. We validate our approach over several video sequences that have been labeled by 16 different experts. Our method is able to match those relevant areas identified by the experts, achieving recall scores higher than 80% when a distance of 80 pixels between method and ground truth is considered. Current performance shows promise when detecting abnormal peaks and movement trends.
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Alloy Das, Sanket Biswas, Ayan Banerjee, Josep Llados, Umapada Pal, & Saumik Bhattacharya. (2024). Harnessing the Power of Multi-Lingual Datasets for Pre-training: Towards Enhancing Text Spotting Performance. In Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 718–728).
Abstract: The adaptation capability to a wide range of domains is crucial for scene text spotting models when deployed to real-world conditions. However, existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches usually incorporate scene text detection and recognition simply by pretraining on natural scene text datasets, which do not directly exploit the intermediate feature representations between multiple domains. Here, we investigate the problem of domain-adaptive scene text spotting, i.e., training a model on multi-domain source data such that it can directly adapt to target domains rather than being specialized for a specific domain or scenario. Further, we investigate a transformer baseline called Swin-TESTR to focus on solving scene-text spotting for both regular and arbitrary-shaped scene text along with an exhaustive evaluation. The results clearly demonstrate the potential of intermediate representations to achieve significant performance on text spotting benchmarks across multiple domains (e.g. language, synth-to-real, and documents). both in terms of accuracy and efficiency.
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Jiaolong Xu, Sebastian Ramos, David Vazquez, & Antonio Lopez. (2014). Domain Adaptation of Deformable Part-Based Models. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 36(12), 2367–2380.
Abstract: The accuracy of object classifiers can significantly drop when the training data (source domain) and the application scenario (target domain) have inherent differences. Therefore, adapting the classifiers to the scenario in which they must operate is of paramount importance. We present novel domain adaptation (DA) methods for object detection. As proof of concept, we focus on adapting the state-of-the-art deformable part-based model (DPM) for pedestrian detection. We introduce an adaptive structural SVM (A-SSVM) that adapts a pre-learned classifier between different domains. By taking into account the inherent structure in feature space (e.g., the parts in a DPM), we propose a structure-aware A-SSVM (SA-SSVM). Neither A-SSVM nor SA-SSVM needs to revisit the source-domain training data to perform the adaptation. Rather, a low number of target-domain training examples (e.g., pedestrians) are used. To address the scenario where there are no target-domain annotated samples, we propose a self-adaptive DPM based on a self-paced learning (SPL) strategy and a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR). Two types of adaptation tasks are assessed: from both synthetic pedestrians and general persons (PASCAL VOC) to pedestrians imaged from an on-board camera. Results show that our proposals avoid accuracy drops as high as 15 points when comparing adapted and non-adapted detectors.
Keywords: Domain Adaptation; Pedestrian Detection
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Patricia Suarez, Angel Sappa, & Boris X. Vintimilla. (2017). Cross-Spectral Image Patch Similarity using Convolutional Neural Network. In IEEE International Workshop of Electronics, Control, Measurement, Signals and their application to Mechatronics.
Abstract: The ability to compare image regions (patches) has been the basis of many approaches to core computer vision problems, including object, texture and scene categorization. Hence, developing representations for image patches have been of interest in several works. The current work focuses on learning similarity between cross-spectral image patches with a 2 channel convolutional neural network (CNN) model. The proposed approach is an adaptation of a previous work, trying to obtain similar results than the state of the art but with a lowcost hardware. Hence, obtained results are compared with both
classical approaches, showing improvements, and a state of the art CNN based approach.
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Marco Pedersoli. (2012). Hierarchical Multiresolution Models for fast Object Detection (Jordi Gonzalez, & Xavier Roca, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: The ability to automatically detect and recognize objects in unconstrained images is becoming more and more critical: from security systems and autonomous robots, to smart phones and augmented reality, intelligent devices need to understand the meaning of images as a composition of semantic objects. This Thesis tackles the problem of fast object detection based on template models. Detection consists of searching for an object in an image by evaluating the similarity between a template model and an image region at each possible location and scale. In this work, we show that using a template model representation based on a multiple resolution hierarchy is an optimal choice that can lead to excellent detection accuracy and fast computation. We implement two different approaches that make use of a hierarchy of multiresolution models: a multiresolution cascade and a coarse-to-fine search. Also, we extend the coarse-to-fine search by introducing a deformable part-based model that achieves state-of-the-art results together with a very reduced computational cost. Finally, we specialize our approach to the challenging task of pedestrian detection from moving vehicles and show that the overall quality of the system outperforms previous works in terms of speed and accuracy.
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Dimosthenis Karatzas, Lluis Gomez, & Marçal Rusiñol. (2017). The Robust Reading Competition Annotation and Evaluation Platform. In 1st International Workshop on Open Services and Tools for Document Analysis.
Abstract: The ICDAR Robust Reading Competition (RRC), initiated in 2003 and re-established in 2011, has become the defacto evaluation standard for the international community. Concurrent with its second incarnation in 2011, a continuous effort started to develop an online framework to facilitate the hosting and management of competitions. This short paper briefly outlines the Robust Reading Competition Annotation and Evaluation Platform, the backbone of the Robust Reading Competition, comprising a collection of tools and processes that aim to simplify the management and annotation
of data, and to provide online and offline performance evaluation and analysis services
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Alicia Fornes, Veronica Romero, Arnau Baro, Juan Ignacio Toledo, Joan Andreu Sanchez, Enrique Vidal, et al. (2017). ICDAR2017 Competition on Information Extraction in Historical Handwritten Records. In 14th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 1389–1394).
Abstract: The extraction of relevant information from historical handwritten document collections is one of the key steps in order to make these manuscripts available for access and searches. In this competition, the goal is to detect the named entities and assign each of them a semantic category, and therefore, to simulate the filling in of a knowledge database. This paper describes the dataset, the tasks, the evaluation metrics, the participants methods and the results.
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Lluis Gomez, Andres Mafla, Marçal Rusiñol, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2018). Single Shot Scene Text Retrieval. In 15th European Conference on Computer Vision (Vol. 11218, pp. 728–744). LNCS.
Abstract: Textual information found in scene images provides high level semantic information about the image and its context and it can be leveraged for better scene understanding. In this paper we address the problem of scene text retrieval: given a text query, the system must return all images containing the queried text. The novelty of the proposed model consists in the usage of a single shot CNN architecture that predicts at the same time bounding boxes and a compact text representation of the words in them. In this way, the text based image retrieval task can be casted as a simple nearest neighbor search of the query text representation over the outputs of the CNN over the entire image
database. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed architecture
outperforms previous state-of-the-art while it offers a significant increase
in processing speed.
Keywords: Image retrieval; Scene text; Word spotting; Convolutional Neural Networks; Region Proposals Networks; PHOC
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Ayan Banerjee, Palaiahnakote Shivakumara, Parikshit Acharya, Umapada Pal, & Josep Llados. (2022). TWD: A New Deep E2E Model for Text Watermark Detection in Video Images. In 26th International Conference on Pattern Recognition.
Abstract: Text watermark detection in video images is challenging because text watermark characteristics are different from caption and scene texts in the video images. Developing a successful model for detecting text watermark, caption, and scene texts is an open challenge. This study aims at developing a new Deep End-to-End model for Text Watermark Detection (TWD), caption and scene text in video images. To standardize non-uniform contrast, quality, and resolution, we explore the U-Net3+ model for enhancing poor quality text without affecting high-quality text. Similarly, to address the challenges of arbitrary orientation, text shapes and complex background, we explore Stacked Hourglass Encoded Fourier Contour Embedding Network (SFCENet) by feeding the output of the U-Net3+ model as input. Furthermore, the proposed work integrates enhancement and detection models as an end-to-end model for detecting multi-type text in video images. To validate the proposed model, we create our own dataset (named TW-866), which provides video images containing text watermark, caption (subtitles), as well as scene text. The proposed model is also evaluated on standard natural scene text detection datasets, namely, ICDAR 2019 MLT, CTW1500, Total-Text, and DAST1500. The results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods. This is the first work on text watermark detection in video images to the best of our knowledge
Keywords: Deep learning; U-Net; FCENet; Scene text detection; Video text detection; Watermark text detection
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Dena Bazazian. (2018). Fully Convolutional Networks for Text Understanding in Scene Images (Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Andrew Bagdanov, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Text understanding in scene images has gained plenty of attention in the computer vision community and it is an important task in many applications as text carries semantically rich information about scene content and context. For instance, reading text in a scene can be applied to autonomous driving, scene understanding or assisting visually impaired people. The general aim of scene text understanding is to localize and recognize text in scene images. Text regions are first localized in the original image by a trained detector model and afterwards fed into a recognition module. The tasks of localization and recognition are highly correlated since an inaccurate localization can affect the recognition task.
The main purpose of this thesis is to devise efficient methods for scene text understanding. We investigate how the latest results on deep learning can advance text understanding pipelines. Recently, Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) and derived methods have achieved a significant performance on semantic segmentation and pixel level classification tasks. Therefore, we took benefit of the strengths of FCN approaches in order to detect text in natural scenes. In this thesis we have focused on two challenging tasks of scene text understanding which are Text Detection and Word Spotting. For the task of text detection, we have proposed an efficient text proposal technique in scene images. We have considered the Text Proposals method as the baseline which is an approach to reduce the search space of possible text regions in an image. In order to improve the Text Proposals method we combined it with Fully Convolutional Networks to efficiently reduce the number of proposals while maintaining the same level of accuracy and thus gaining a significant speed up. Our experiments demonstrate that this text proposal approach yields significantly higher recall rates than the line based text localization techniques, while also producing better-quality localization. We have also applied this technique on compressed images such as videos from wearable egocentric cameras. For the task of word spotting, we have introduced a novel mid-level word representation method. We have proposed a technique to create and exploit an intermediate representation of images based on text attributes which roughly correspond to character probability maps. Our representation extends the concept of Pyramidal Histogram Of Characters (PHOC) by exploiting Fully Convolutional Networks to derive a pixel-wise mapping of the character distribution within candidate word regions. We call this representation the Soft-PHOC. Furthermore, we show how to use Soft-PHOC descriptors for word spotting tasks through an efficient text line proposal algorithm. To evaluate the detected text, we propose a novel line based evaluation along with the classic bounding box based approach. We test our method on incidental scene text images which comprises real-life scenarios such as urban scenes. The importance of incidental scene text images is due to the complexity of backgrounds, perspective, variety of script and language, short text and little linguistic context. All of these factors together makes the incidental scene text images challenging.
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Dena Bazazian, Raul Gomez, Anguelos Nicolaou, Lluis Gomez, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Andrew Bagdanov. (2016). Improving Text Proposals for Scene Images with Fully Convolutional Networks. In 23rd International Conference on Pattern Recognition Workshops.
Abstract: Text Proposals have emerged as a class-dependent version of object proposals – efficient approaches to reduce the search space of possible text object locations in an image. Combined with strong word classifiers, text proposals currently yield top state of the art results in end-to-end scene text
recognition. In this paper we propose an improvement over the original Text Proposals algorithm of [1], combining it with Fully Convolutional Networks to improve the ranking of proposals. Results on the ICDAR RRC and the COCO-text datasets show superior performance over current state-of-the-art.
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David Fernandez, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2014). A graph-based approach for segmenting touching lines in historical handwritten documents. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 17(3), 293–312.
Abstract: Text line segmentation in handwritten documents is an important task in the recognition of historical documents. Handwritten document images contain text lines with multiple orientations, touching and overlapping characters between consecutive text lines and different document structures, making line segmentation a difficult task. In this paper, we present a new approach for handwritten text line segmentation solving the problems of touching components, curvilinear text lines and horizontally overlapping components. The proposed algorithm formulates line segmentation as finding the central path in the area between two consecutive lines. This is solved as a graph traversal problem. A graph is constructed using the skeleton of the image. Then, a path-finding algorithm is used to find the optimum path between text lines. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on a comprehensive dataset consisting of five databases: ICDAR2009, ICDAR2013, UMD, the George Washington and the Barcelona Marriages Database. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art considering the different types and difficulties of the benchmarking data.
Keywords: Text line segmentation; Handwritten documents; Document image processing; Historical document analysis
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Suman Ghosh. (2018). Word Spotting and Recognition in Images from Heterogeneous Sources A (Ernest Valveny, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Text is the most common way of information sharing from ages. With recent development of personal images databases and handwritten historic manuscripts the demand for algorithms to make these databases accessible for browsing and indexing are in rise. Enabling search or understanding large collection of manuscripts or image databases needs fast and robust methods. Researchers have found different ways to represent cropped words for understanding and matching, which works well when words are already segmented. However there is no trivial way to extend these for non-segmented documents. In this thesis we explore different methods for text retrieval and recognition from unsegmented document and scene images. Two different ways of representation exist in literature, one uses a fixed length representation learned from cropped words and another a sequence of features of variable length. Throughout this thesis, we have studied both these representation for their suitability in segmentation free understanding of text. In the first part we are focused on segmentation free word spotting using a fixed length representation. We extended the use of the successful PHOC (Pyramidal Histogram of Character) representation to segmentation free retrieval. In the second part of the thesis, we explore sequence based features and finally, we propose a unified solution where the same framework can generate both kind of representations.
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N. Nayef, F. Yin, I. Bizid, H.Choi, Y. Feng, Dimosthenis Karatzas, et al. (2017). ICDAR2017 Robust Reading Challenge on Multi-Lingual Scene Text Detection and Script Identification – RRC-MLT. In 14th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 1454–1459).
Abstract: Text detection and recognition in a natural environment are key components of many applications, ranging from business card digitization to shop indexation in a street. This competition aims at assessing the ability of state-of-the-art methods to detect Multi-Lingual Text (MLT) in scene images, such as in contents gathered from the Internet media and in modern cities where multiple cultures live and communicate together. This competition is an extension of the Robust Reading Competition (RRC) which has been held since 2003 both in ICDAR and in an online context. The proposed competition is presented as a new challenge of the RRC. The dataset built for this challenge largely extends the previous RRC editions in many aspects: the multi-lingual text, the size of the dataset, the multi-oriented text, the wide variety of scenes. The dataset is comprised of 18,000 images which contain text belonging to 9 languages. The challenge is comprised of three tasks related to text detection and script classification. We have received a total of 16 participations from the research and industrial communities. This paper presents the dataset, the tasks and the findings of this RRC-MLT challenge.
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