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Author David Aldavert
Title Efficient and Scalable Handwritten Word Spotting on Historical Documents using Bag of Visual Words Type Book Whole
Year 2021 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Word spotting can be defined as the pattern recognition tasked aimed at locating and retrieving a specific keyword within a document image collection without explicitly transcribing the whole corpus. Its use is particularly interesting when applied in scenarios where Optical Character Recognition performs poorly or can not be used at all. This thesis focuses on such a scenario, word spotting on historical handwritten documents that have been written by a single author or by multiple authors with a similar calligraphy.
This problem requires a visual signature that is robust to image artifacts, flexible to accommodate script variations and efficient to retrieve information in a rapid manner. For this, we have developed a set of word spotting methods that on their foundation use the well known Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) representation. This representation has gained popularity among the document image analysis community to characterize handwritten words
in an unsupervised manner. However, most approaches on this field rely on a basic BoVW configuration and disregard complex encoding and spatial representations. We determine which BoVW configurations provide the best performance boost to a spotting system.
Then, we extend the segmentation-based word spotting, where word candidates are given a priori, to segmentation-free spotting. The proposed approach seeds the document images with overlapping word location candidates and characterizes them with a BoVW signature. Retrieval is achieved comparing the query and candidate signatures and returning the locations that provide a higher consensus. This is a simple but powerful approach that requires a more compact signature than in a segmentation-based scenario. We first
project the BoVW signature into a reduced semantic topics space and then compress it further using Product Quantizers. The resulting signature only requires a few dozen bytes, allowing us to index thousands of pages on a common desktop computer. The final system still yields a performance comparable to the state-of-the-art despite all the information loss during the compression phases.
Afterwards, we also study how to combine different modalities of information in order to create a query-by-X spotting system where, words are indexed using an information modality and queries are retrieved using another. We consider three different information modalities: visual, textual and audio. Our proposal is to create a latent feature space where features which are semantically related are projected onto the same topics. Creating thus a new feature space where information from different modalities can be compared. Later, we consider the codebook generation and descriptor encoding problem. The codebooks used to encode the BoVW signatures are usually created using an unsupervised clustering algorithm and, they require to test multiple parameters to determine which configuration is best for a certain document collection. We propose a semantic clustering algorithm which allows to estimate the best parameter from data. Since gather annotated data is costly, we use synthetically generated word images. The resulting codebook is database agnostic, i. e. a codebook that yields a good performance on document collections that use the same script. We also propose the use of an additional codebook to approximate descriptors and reduce the descriptor encoding
complexity to sub-linear.
Finally, we focus on the problem of signatures dimensionality. We propose a new symbol probability signature where each bin represents the probability that a certain symbol is present a certain location of the word image. This signature is extremely compact and combined with compression techniques can represent word images with just a few bytes per signature.
Address April 2021
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Marçal Rusiñol;Josep Llados
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-122714-5-4 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes DAG; 600.121 Approved no
Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Ald2021 Serial 3601
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Author Jose Manuel Alvarez; Y. LeCun; Theo Gevers; Antonio Lopez
Title Semantic Road Segmentation via Multi-Scale Ensembles of Learned Features Type Conference Article
Year 2012 Publication 12th European Conference on Computer Vision – Workshops and Demonstrations Abbreviated Journal
Volume 7584 Issue Pages 586-595
Keywords road detection
Abstract Semantic segmentation refers to the process of assigning an object label (e.g., building, road, sidewalk, car, pedestrian) to every pixel in an image. Common approaches formulate the task as a random field labeling problem modeling the interactions between labels by combining local and contextual features such as color, depth, edges, SIFT or HoG. These models are trained to maximize the likelihood of the correct classification given a training set. However, these approaches rely on hand–designed features (e.g., texture, SIFT or HoG) and a higher computational time required in the inference process.
Therefore, in this paper, we focus on estimating the unary potentials of a conditional random field via ensembles of learned features. We propose an algorithm based on convolutional neural networks to learn local features from training data at different scales and resolutions. Then, diversification between these features is exploited using a weighted linear combination. Experiments on a publicly available database show the effectiveness of the proposed method to perform semantic road scene segmentation in still images. The algorithm outperforms appearance based methods and its performance is similar compared to state–of–the–art methods using other sources of information such as depth, motion or stereo.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Springer Berlin Heidelberg Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title LNCS
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 0302-9743 ISBN 978-3-642-33867-0 Medium
Area Expedition Conference ECCVW
Notes ADAS;ISE Approved no
Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ ALG2012; ADAS @ adas Serial 2187
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Author Jose Manuel Alvarez; Antonio Lopez; Theo Gevers; Felipe Lumbreras
Title Combining Priors, Appearance and Context for Road Detection Type Journal Article
Year 2014 Publication IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems Abbreviated Journal TITS
Volume 15 Issue 3 Pages 1168-1178
Keywords Illuminant invariance; lane markings; road detection; road prior; road scene understanding; vanishing point; 3-D scene layout
Abstract Detecting the free road surface ahead of a moving vehicle is an important research topic in different areas of computer vision, such as autonomous driving or car collision warning.
Current vision-based road detection methods are usually based solely on low-level features. Furthermore, they generally assume structured roads, road homogeneity, and uniform lighting conditions, constraining their applicability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, road priors and contextual information are introduced for road detection. First, we propose an algorithm to estimate road priors online using geographical information, providing relevant initial information about the road location. Then, contextual cues, including horizon lines, vanishing points, lane markings, 3-D scene layout, and road geometry, are used in addition to low-level cues derived from the appearance of roads. Finally, a generative model is used to combine these cues and priors, leading to a road detection method that is, to a large degree, robust to varying imaging conditions, road types, and scenarios.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1524-9050 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ADAS; 600.076;ISE Approved no
Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ ALG2014 Serial 2501
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Author Murad Al Haj
Title Face Detection in Color Images Using Primitive Shape Features Type Report
Year 2008 Publication CVC Technical Report #118 Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract
Address Bellaterra (Spain)
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ISE Approved no
Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ AlH2008 Serial 945
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Author Jose Manuel Alvarez; Felipe Lumbreras; Antonio Lopez; Theo Gevers
Title Understanding Road Scenes using Visual Cues Type Miscellaneous
Year 2012 Publication European Conference on Computer Vision Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract DEMO
Address Florence; Italy
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ISE Approved no
Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ ALL2012 Serial 2795
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Author Jose Manuel Alvarez; Antonio Lopez
Title Photometric Invariance by Machine Learning Type Book Chapter
Year 2012 Publication Color in Computer Vision: Fundamentals and Applications Abbreviated Journal
Volume 7 Issue Pages 113-134
Keywords road detection
Abstract
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher iConcept Press Ltd Place of Publication Editor Theo Gevers, Arjan Gijsenij, Joost van de Weijer, Jan-Mark Geusebroek
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-0-470-89084-4 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ADAS Approved no
Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ AlL2012 Serial 2186
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Author Jon Almazan
Title Deforming the Blurred Shape Model for Shape Description and Recognition Type Report
Year 2010 Publication CVC Technical Report Abbreviated Journal
Volume 163 Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Master's thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes Approved no
Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Alm2010 Serial 1354
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Author Jon Almazan
Title Learning to Represent Handwritten Shapes and Words for Matching and Recognition Type Book Whole
Year 2014 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Writing is one of the most important forms of communication and for centuries, handwriting had been the most reliable way to preserve knowledge. However, despite the recent development of printing houses and electronic devices, handwriting is still broadly used for taking notes, doing annotations, or sketching ideas.
Transferring the ability of understanding handwritten text or recognizing handwritten shapes to computers has been the goal of many researches due to its huge importance for many different fields. However, designing good representations to deal with handwritten shapes, e.g. symbols or words, is a very challenging problem due to the large variability of these kinds of shapes. One of the consequences of working with handwritten shapes is that we need representations to be robust, i.e., able to adapt to large intra-class variability. We need representations to be discriminative, i.e., able to learn what are the differences between classes. And, we need representations to be efficient, i.e., able to be rapidly computed and compared. Unfortunately, current techniques of handwritten shape representation for matching and recognition do not fulfill some or all of these requirements.
Through this thesis we focus on the problem of learning to represent handwritten shapes aimed at retrieval and recognition tasks. Concretely, on the first part of the thesis, we focus on the general problem of representing any kind of handwritten shape. We first present a novel shape descriptor based on a deformable grid that deals with large deformations by adapting to the shape and where the cells of the grid can be used to extract different features. Then, we propose to use this descriptor to learn statistical models, based on the Active Appearance Model, that jointly learns the variability in structure and texture of a given class. Then, on the second part, we focus on a concrete application, the problem of representing handwritten words, for the tasks of word spotting, where the goal is to find all instances of a query word in a dataset of images, and recognition. First, we address the segmentation-free problem and propose an unsupervised, sliding-window-based approach that achieves state-of- the-art results in two public datasets. Second, we address the more challenging multi-writer problem, where the variability in words exponentially increases. We describe an approach in which both word images and text strings are embedded in a common vectorial subspace, and where those that represent the same word are close together. This is achieved by a combination of label embedding and attributes learning, and a common subspace regression. This leads to a low-dimensional, unified representation of word images and strings, resulting in a method that allows one to perform either image and text searches, as well as image transcription, in a unified framework. We evaluate our methods on different public datasets of both handwritten documents and natural images showing results comparable or better than the state-of-the-art on spotting and recognition tasks.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Ernest Valveny;Alicia Fornes
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes DAG; 600.077 Approved no
Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Alm2014 Serial 2572
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Author David Aldavert; Marçal Rusiñol
Title Manuscript text line detection and segmentation using second-order derivatives analysis Type Conference Article
Year 2018 Publication 13th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages 293 - 298
Keywords text line detection; text line segmentation; text region detection; second-order derivatives
Abstract In this paper, we explore the use of second-order derivatives to detect text lines on handwritten document images. Taking advantage that the second derivative gives a minimum response when a dark linear element over a
bright background has the same orientation as the filter, we use this operator to create a map with the local orientation and strength of putative text lines in the document. Then, we detect line segments by selecting and merging the filter responses that have a similar orientation and scale. Finally, text lines are found by merging the segments that are within the same text region. The proposed segmentation algorithm, is learning-free while showing a performance similar to the state of the art methods in publicly available datasets.
Address Viena; Austria; April 2018
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference DAS
Notes DAG; 600.084; 600.129; 302.065; 600.121 Approved no
Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ AlR2018a Serial 3104
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Author David Aldavert; Marçal Rusiñol
Title Synthetically generated semantic codebook for Bag-of-Visual-Words based word spotting Type Conference Article
Year 2018 Publication 13th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages 223 - 228
Keywords Word Spotting; Bag of Visual Words; Synthetic Codebook; Semantic Information
Abstract Word-spotting methods based on the Bag-ofVisual-Words framework have demonstrated a good retrieval performance even when used in a completely unsupervised manner. Although unsupervised approaches are suitable for
large document collections due to the cost of acquiring labeled data, these methods also present some drawbacks. For instance, having to train a suitable “codebook” for a certain dataset has a high computational cost. Therefore, in
this paper we present a database agnostic codebook which is trained from synthetic data. The aim of the proposed approach is to generate a codebook where the only information required is the type of script used in the document. The use of synthetic data also allows to easily incorporate semantic
information in the codebook generation. So, the proposed method is able to determine which set of codewords have a semantic representation of the descriptor feature space. Experimental results show that the resulting codebook attains a state-of-the-art performance while having a more compact representation.
Address Viena; Austria; April 2018
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference DAS
Notes DAG; 600.084; 600.129; 600.121 Approved no
Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ AlR2018b Serial 3105
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Author Ariel Amato; Felipe Lumbreras; Angel Sappa
Title A General-purpose Crowdsourcing Platform for Mobile Devices Type Conference Article
Year 2014 Publication 9th International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications Abbreviated Journal
Volume 3 Issue Pages 211-215
Keywords Crowdsourcing Platform; Mobile Crowdsourcing
Abstract This paper presents details of a general purpose micro-task on-demand platform based on the crowdsourcing philosophy. This platform was specifically developed for mobile devices in order to exploit the strengths of such devices; namely: i) massivity, ii) ubiquity and iii) embedded sensors. The combined use of mobile platforms and the crowdsourcing model allows to tackle from the simplest to the most complex tasks. Users experience is the highlighted feature of this platform (this fact is extended to both task-proposer and tasksolver). Proper tools according with a specific task are provided to a task-solver in order to perform his/her job in a simpler, faster and appealing way. Moreover, a task can be easily submitted by just selecting predefined templates, which cover a wide range of possible applications. Examples of its usage in computer vision and computer games are provided illustrating the potentiality of the platform.
Address Lisboa; Portugal; January 2014
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference VISAPP
Notes ISE; ADAS; 600.054; 600.055; 600.076; 600.078 Approved no
Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ ALS2014 Serial 2478
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Author David Aldavert; Ricardo Toledo
Title Stereo Vision Local Map Alignment for Robot Environment Mapping Type Book Chapter
Year 2008 Publication Robot Vision Second International Workshop, RobVis Abbreviated Journal
Volume 4931 Issue Pages 111–124
Keywords
Abstract
Address Auckland (New Zealand)
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title LNCS
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ADAS Approved no
Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ AlT2008 Serial 1100
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Jose Manuel Alvarez
Title On-Board Road Surface Segmentation Type Report
Year 2007 Publication CVC Technical Report #108 Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract
Address CVC (UAB)
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ADAS Approved no
Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Alv2007 Serial 820
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Jose Manuel Alvarez
Title Combining Context and Appearance for Road Detection Type Book Whole
Year 2010 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Road traffic crashes have become a major cause of death and injury throughout the world.
Hence, in order to improve road safety, the automobile manufacture is moving towards the
development of vehicles with autonomous functionalities such as keeping in the right lane, safe distance keeping between vehicles or regulating the speed of the vehicle according to the traffic conditions. A key component of these systems is vision–based road detection that aims to detect the free road surface ahead the moving vehicle. Detecting the road using a monocular vision system is very challenging since the road is an outdoor scenario imaged from a mobile platform. Hence, the detection algorithm must be able to deal with continuously changing imaging conditions such as the presence ofdifferent objects (vehicles, pedestrians), different environments (urban, highways, off–road), different road types (shape, color), and different imaging conditions (varying illumination, different viewpoints and changing weather conditions). Therefore, in this thesis, we focus on vision–based road detection using a single color camera. More precisely, we first focus on analyzing and grouping pixels according to their low–level properties. In this way, two different approaches are presented to exploit
color and photometric invariance. Then, we focus the research of the thesis on exploiting context information. This information provides relevant knowledge about the road not using pixel features from road regions but semantic information from the analysis of the scene.
In this way, we present two different approaches to infer the geometry of the road ahead
the moving vehicle. Finally, we focus on combining these context and appearance (color)
approaches to improve the overall performance of road detection algorithms. The qualitative and quantitative results presented in this thesis on real–world driving sequences show that the proposed method is robust to varying imaging conditions, road types and scenarios going beyond the state–of–the–art.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Antonio Lopez;Theo Gevers
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-937261-8-8 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ADAS Approved no
Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Alv2010 Serial 1454
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Author Susana Alvarez; Maria Vanrell
Title Texton theory revisited: a bag-of-words approach to combine textons Type Journal Article
Year 2012 Publication Pattern Recognition Abbreviated Journal PR
Volume 45 Issue 12 Pages 4312-4325
Keywords
Abstract The aim of this paper is to revisit an old theory of texture perception and
update its computational implementation by extending it to colour. With this in mind we try to capture the optimality of perceptual systems. This is achieved in the proposed approach by sharing well-known early stages of the visual processes and extracting low-dimensional features that perfectly encode adequate properties for a large variety of textures without needing further learning stages. We propose several descriptors in a bag-of-words framework that are derived from different quantisation models on to the feature spaces. Our perceptual features are directly given by the shape and colour attributes of image blobs, which are the textons. In this way we avoid learning visual words and directly build the vocabularies on these lowdimensionaltexton spaces. Main differences between proposed descriptors rely on how co-occurrence of blob attributes is represented in the vocabularies. Our approach overcomes current state-of-art in colour texture description which is proved in several experiments on large texture datasets.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 0031-3203 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes CIC Approved no
Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ AlV2012a Serial 2130
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