Abstract: Impact factor 2010: 2.92
Impact factor 2011/2012?: 3.32
Color constancy algorithms are generally based on the simplifying assumption that the spectral distribution of a light source is uniform across scenes. However, in reality, this assumption is often violated due to the presence of multiple light sources. In this paper, we will address more realistic scenarios where the uniform light-source assumption is too restrictive. First, a methodology is proposed to extend existing algorithms by applying color constancy locally to image patches, rather than globally to the entire image. After local (patch-based) illuminant estimation, these estimates are combined into more robust estimations, and a local correction is applied based on a modified diagonal model. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on spectral and real images show that the proposed methodology reduces the influence of two light sources simultaneously present in one scene. If the chromatic difference between these two illuminants is more than 1° , the proposed framework outperforms algorithms based on the uniform light-source assumption (with error-reduction up to approximately 30%). Otherwise, when the chromatic difference is less than 1° and the scene can be considered to contain one (approximately) uniform light source, the performance of the proposed method framework is similar to global color constancy methods.

Abstract: We introduce the structured scene-text spotting task, which requires a scene-text OCR system to spot text in the wild according to a query regular expression. Contrary to generic scene text OCR, structured scene-text spotting seeks to dynamically condition both scene text detection and recognition on user-provided regular expressions. To tackle this task, we propose the Structured TExt sPotter (STEP), a model that exploits the provided text structure to guide the OCR process. STEP is able to deal with regular expressions that contain spaces and it is not bound to detection at the word-level granularity. Our approach enables accurate zero-shot structured text spotting in a wide variety of real-world reading scenarios and is solely trained on publicly available data. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we introduce a new challenging test dataset that contains several types of out-of-vocabulary structured text, reflecting important reading applications of fields such as prices, dates, serial numbers, license plates etc. We demonstrate that STEP can provide specialised OCR performance on demand in all tested scenarios.

Abstract: Invited speaker

Abstract: Pattern recognition is the task that aims at distinguishing objects among different classes. When such a task wants to be solved in an automatic way a crucial step is how to formally represent such patterns to the computer. Based on the different representational formalisms, we may distinguish between statistical and structural pattern recognition. The former describes objects as a set of measurements arranged in the form of what is called a feature vector. The latter assumes that relations between parts of the underlying objects need to be explicitly represented and thus it uses relational structures such as graphs for encoding their inherent information. Vector spaces are a very flexible mathematical structure that has allowed to come up with several efficient ways for the analysis of patterns under the form of feature vectors. Nevertheless, such a representation cannot explicitly cope with binary relations between parts of the objects and it is restricted to measure the exact same number of features for each pattern under study regardless of their complexity. Graph-based representations present the contrary situation. They can easily adapt to the inherent complexity of the patterns but introduce a problem of high computational complexity, hindering the design of efficient tools to process and analyse patterns.
Solving this paradox is the main goal of this thesis. The ideal situation for solving pattern recognition problems would be to represent the patterns using relational structures such as graphs, and to be able to use the wealthy repository of data processing tools from the statistical pattern recognition domain. An elegant solution to this problem is to transform the graph domain into a vector domain where any processing algorithm can be applied. In other words, by mapping each graph to a point in a vector space we automatically get access to the rich set of algorithms from the statistical domain to be applied in the graph domain. Such methodology is called graph embedding.
In this thesis we propose to associate feature vectors to graphs in a simple and very efficient way by just putting attention on the labelling information that graphs store. In particular, we count frequencies of node labels and of edges between labels. Although their locality, these features are able to robustly represent structurally global properties of graphs, when considered together in the form of a vector. We initially deal with the case of discrete attributed graphs, where features are easy to compute. The continuous case is tackled as a natural generalization of the discrete one, where rather than counting node and edge labelling instances, we count statistics of some representatives of them. We encounter how the proposed vectorial representations of graphs suffer from high dimensionality and correlation among components and we face these problems by feature selection algorithms. We also explore how the diversity of different embedding representations can be exploited in order to boost the performance of base classifiers in a multiple classifier systems framework. An extensive experimental evaluation finally shows how the methodology we propose can be efficiently computed and compete with other graph matching and embedding methodologies.

Abstract: arXiv:1706.01487
In this paper we propose an approach to lexicon-free recognition of text in scene images. Our approach relies on a LSTM-based soft visual attention model learned from convolutional features. A set of feature vectors are derived from an intermediate convolutional layer corresponding to different areas of the image. This permits encoding of spatial information into the image representation. In this way, the framework is able to learn how to selectively focus on different parts of the image. At every time step the recognizer emits one character using a weighted combination of the convolutional feature vectors according to the learned attention model. Training can be done end-to-end using only word level annotations. In addition, we show that modifying the beam search algorithm by integrating an explicit language model leads to significantly better recognition results. We validate the performance of our approach on standard SVT and ICDAR'03 scene text datasets, showing state-of-the-art performance in unconstrained text recognition.

Abstract: In this paper we propose a segmentation-free approach to word spotting. Word images are first encoded into feature vectors using Fisher Vector. Then, these feature vectors are used together with pyramidal histogram of characters labels (PHOC) to learn SVM-based attribute models. Documents are represented by these PHOC based word attributes. To efficiently compute the word attributes over a sliding window, we propose to use an integral image representation of the document using a simplified version of the attribute model. Finally we re-rank the top word candidates using the more discriminative full version of the word attributes. We show state-of-the-art results for segmentation-free query-by-example word spotting in single-writer and multi-writer standard datasets.