Abstract: This paper presents a novel hybrid approach that combines state of the art fitting algorithms: algebraic-based and geometric-based. It consists of two steps; first, the 3L algorithm is used as an initialization and then, the obtained result, is improved through a geometric approach. The adopted geometric approach is based on a distance estimation that avoids costly search for the real orthogonal distance. Experimental results are presented as well as quantitative comparisons.

Abstract: We present a new method for explicit graph embedding. Our algorithm extracts a feature vector for an undirected attributed graph. The proposed feature vector encodes details about the number of nodes, number of edges, node degrees, the attributes of nodes and the attributes of edges in the graph. The first two features are for the number of nodes and the number of edges. These are followed by w features for node degrees, m features for k node attributes and n features for l edge attributes — which represent the distribution of node degrees, node attribute values and edge attribute values, and are obtained by defining (in an unsupervised fashion), fuzzy-intervals over the list of node degrees, node attributes and edge attributes. Experimental results are provided for sample data of ICPR2010 contest GEPR.

Abstract: We present a content spotting system for line drawing graphic document images. The proposed system is sufficiently domain independent and takes the keyword based information retrieval for graphic documents, one step forward, to Query By Example (QBE) and focused retrieval. During offline learning mode: we vectorize the documents in the repository, represent them by attributed relational graphs, extract regions of interest (ROIs) from them, convert each ROI to a fuzzy structural signature, cluster similar signatures to form ROI classes and build an index for the repository. During online querying mode: a Bayesian network classifier recognizes the ROIs in the query image and the corresponding documents are fetched by looking up in the repository index. Experimental results are presented for synthetic images of architectural and electronic documents.

Abstract: Transcription of handwritten text in (old) documents is an important, time-consuming task for digital libraries. It might be carried out by first processing all document images off-line, and then manually supervising system transcriptions to edit incorrect parts. However, current techniques for automatic page layout analysis, text line detection and handwriting recognition are still far from perfect, and thus post-editing system output is not clearly better than simply ignoring it.
A more effective approach to transcribe old text documents is to follow an interactive- predictive paradigm in which both, the system is guided by the user, and the user is assisted by the system to complete the transcription task as efficiently as possible. Following this approach, a system prototype called GIDOC (Gimp-based Interactive transcription of old text DOCuments) has been developed to provide user-friendly, integrated support for interactive-predictive layout analysis, line detection and handwriting transcription.
GIDOC is designed to work with (large) collections of homogeneous documents, that is, of similar structure and writing styles. They are annotated sequentially, by (par- tially) supervising hypotheses drawn from statistical models that are constantly updated with an increasing number of available annotated documents. And this is done at different annotation levels. For instance, at the level of page layout analysis, GIDOC uses a novel text block detection method in which conventional, memoryless techniques are improved with a “history” model of text block positions. Similarly, at the level of text line image transcription, GIDOC includes a handwriting recognizer which is steadily improved with a growing number of (partially) supervised transcriptions.

Abstract: Abstract: In this paper we show how the techniques of image deconvolution can increase the ability of image sensors as, for example, CCD imagers, to detect faint stars or faint orbital objects (small satellites and space debris). In the case of faint stars, we show that this benefit is equivalent to double the quantum efficiency of the used image sensor or to increase the effective telescope aperture by more than 30% without decreasing the astrometric precision or introducing artificial bias. In the case of orbital objects, the deconvolution technique can double the signal-to-noise ratio of the image, which helps to discover and control dangerous objects as space debris or lost satellites. The benefits obtained using CCD detectors can be extrapolated to any kind of image sensors.

Abstract: The amount of digitized legacy documents has been rising dramatically over the last years due mainly to the increasing number of on-line digital libraries publishing this kind of documents, waiting to be classified and finally transcribed into a textual electronic format (such as ASCII or PDF). Nevertheless, most of the available fully-automatic applications addressing this task are far from being perfect and heavy and inefficient human intervention is often required to check and correct the results of such systems. In contrast, multimodal interactive-predictive approaches may allow the users to participate in the process helping the system to improve the overall performance. With this in mind, two sets of recent advances are introduced in this work: a novel interactive method for text block detection and two multimodal interactive handwritten text transcription systems which use active learning and interactive-predictive technologies in the recognition process.