Abstract: This paper deals with automatic detection of seal (stamp) from documents with cluttered background. Seal detection involves a difficult challenge due to its multi-oriented nature, arbitrary shape, overlapping of its part with signature, noise, etc. Here, a seal object is characterized by scale and rotation invariant spatial feature descriptors computed from recognition result of individual connected components (characters). Scale and rotation invariant features are used in a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to recognize multi-scale and multi-oriented text characters. The concept of generalized Hough transform (GHT) is used to detect the seal and a voting scheme is designed for finding possible location of the seal in a document based on the spatial feature descriptor of neighboring component pairs. The peak of votes in GHT accumulator validates the hypothesis to locate the seal in a document. Experiment is performed in an archive of historical documents of handwritten/printed English text. Experimental results show that the method is robust in locating seal instances of arbitrary shape and orientation in documents, and also efficient in indexing a collection of documents for retrieval purposes.

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.

Abstract: The visual system perceives the colour of surfaces approximately constant under changes of illumination. In this work, we investigate how stable is the perception of categorical \“focal\” colours and their interrelations with varying illuminants and simple chromatic backgrounds. It has been proposed that best examples of colour categories across languages cluster in small regions of the colour space and are restricted to a set of 11 basic terms (Kay and Regier, 2003 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 100 9085\–9089). Following this, we developed a psychophysical paradigm that exploits the ability of subjects to reliably reproduce the most representative examples of each category, adjusting multiple test patches embedded in a coloured Mondrian. The experiment was run on a CRT monitor (inside a dark room) under various simulated illuminants. We modelled the recorded data for each subject and adapted state as a 3D interconnected structure (graph) in Lab space. The graph nodes were the subject\’s focal colours at each adaptation state. The model allowed us to get a better distance measure between focal structures under different illuminants. We found that perceptual focal structures tend to be preserved better than the structures of the physical \“ideal\” colours under illuminant changes.

Abstract: Color constancy is usually measured by achromatic setting, asymmetric matching, or color naming paradigms, whose results are interpreted in terms of indexes and models that arguably do not capture the full complexity of the phenomenon. Here we propose a new paradigm, chromatic setting, which allows a more comprehensive characterization of color constancy through the measurement of multiple points in color space under immersive adaptation. We demonstrated its feasibility by assessing the consistency of subjects' responses over time. The paradigm was applied to two-dimensional (2-D) Mondrian stimuli under three different illuminants, and the results were used to fit a set of linear color constancy models. The use of multiple colors improved the precision of more complex linear models compared to the popular diagonal model computed from gray. Our results show that a diagonal plus translation matrix that models mechanisms other than cone gain might be best suited to explain the phenomenon. Additionally, we calculated a number of color constancy indices for several points in color space, and our results suggest that interrelations among colors are not as uniform as previously believed. To account for this variability, we developed a new structural color constancy index that takes into account the magnitude and orientation of the chromatic shift in addition to the interrelations among colors and memory effects.

Abstract: CoRR abs/1402.5766
We propose a meta-parameter free, off-the-shelf, simple and fast unsupervised feature learning algorithm, which exploits a new way of optimizing for sparsity. Experiments on STL-10 show that the method presents state-of-the-art performance and provides discriminative features that generalize well.

Abstract: By means of computer vision algorithms scanned images of maps are processed in order to extract relevant geographic information from printed coordinate pairs. The meaningful information is then transformed into georeferencing information for each single map sheet, and the complete set is compiled to produce a graphical index sheet for the map series along with relevant metadata. The whole process is fully automated and trained to attain maximum effectivity and throughput.

Abstract: Finding a person across a camera network plays an important role in video surveillance. For a real-world person re-identification application, in order to guarantee an optimal time response, it is crucial to find the balance between accuracy and speed. We analyse this trade-off, comparing a classical method, that comprises hand-crafted feature description and metric learning, in particular, LOMO and XQDA, to deep learning based techniques, using image classification networks, ResNet and MobileNets. Additionally, we propose and analyse network distillation as a learning strategy to reduce the computational cost of the deep learning approach at test time. We evaluate both methods on the Market-1501 and DukeMTMC-reID large-scale datasets, showing that distillation helps reducing the computational cost at inference time while even increasing the accuracy performance.