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Lluis Gomez, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2013). Multi-script Text Extraction from Natural Scenes. In 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 467–471).
Abstract: Scene text extraction methodologies are usually based in classification of individual regions or patches, using a priori knowledge for a given script or language. Human perception of text, on the other hand, is based on perceptual organisation through which text emerges as a perceptually significant group of atomic objects. Therefore humans are able to detect text even in languages and scripts never seen before. In this paper, we argue that the text extraction problem could be posed as the detection of meaningful groups of regions. We present a method built around a perceptual organisation framework that exploits collaboration of proximity and similarity laws to create text-group hypotheses. Experiments demonstrate that our algorithm is competitive with state of the art approaches on a standard dataset covering text in variable orientations and two languages.
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Hongxing Gao, Marçal Rusiñol, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Josep Llados, Tomokazu Sato, Masakazu Iwamura, et al. (2013). Key-region detection for document images -applications to administrative document retrieval. In 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 230–234).
Abstract: In this paper we argue that a key-region detector designed to take into account the special characteristics of document images can result in the detection of less and more meaningful key-regions. We propose a fast key-region detector able to capture aspects of the structural information of the document, and demonstrate its efficiency by comparing against standard detectors in an administrative document retrieval scenario. We show that using the proposed detector results to a smaller number of detected key-regions and higher performance without any drop in speed compared to standard state of the art detectors.
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Andreas Fischer, Volkmar Frinken, Horst Bunke, & Ching Y. Suen. (2013). Improving HMM-Based Keyword Spotting with Character Language Models. In 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 506–510).
Abstract: Facing high error rates and slow recognition speed for full text transcription of unconstrained handwriting images, keyword spotting is a promising alternative to locate specific search terms within scanned document images. We have previously proposed a learning-based method for keyword spotting using character hidden Markov models that showed a high performance when compared with traditional template image matching. In the lexicon-free approach pursued, only the text appearance was taken into account for recognition. In this paper, we integrate character n-gram language models into the spotting system in order to provide an additional language context. On the modern IAM database as well as the historical George Washington database, we demonstrate that character language models significantly improve the spotting performance.
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Christophe Rigaud, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Joost Van de Weijer, Jean-Christophe Burie, & Jean-Marc Ogier. (2013). An active contour model for speech balloon detection in comics. In 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 1240–1244).
Abstract: Comic books constitute an important cultural heritage asset in many countries. Digitization combined with subsequent comic book understanding would enable a variety of new applications, including content-based retrieval and content retargeting. Document understanding in this domain is challenging as comics are semi-structured documents, combining semantically important graphical and textual parts. Few studies have been done in this direction. In this work we detail a novel approach for closed and non-closed speech balloon localization in scanned comic book pages, an essential step towards a fully automatic comic book understanding. The approach is compared with existing methods for closed balloon localization found in the literature and results are presented.
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Alicia Fornes, Xavier Otazu, & Josep Llados. (2013). Show through cancellation and image enhancement by multiresolution contrast processing. In 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 200–204).
Abstract: Historical documents suffer from different types of degradation and noise such as background variation, uneven illumination or dark spots. In case of double-sided documents, another common problem is that the back side of the document usually interferes with the front side because of the transparency of the document or ink bleeding. This effect is called the show through phenomenon. Many methods are developed to solve these problems, and in the case of show-through, by scanning and matching both the front and back sides of the document. In contrast, our approach is designed to use only one side of the scanned document. We hypothesize that show-trough are low contrast components, while foreground components are high contrast ones. A Multiresolution Contrast (MC) decomposition is presented in order to estimate the contrast of features at different spatial scales. We cancel the show-through phenomenon by thresholding these low contrast components. This decomposition is also able to enhance the image removing shadowed areas by weighting spatial scales. Results show that the enhanced images improve the readability of the documents, allowing scholars both to recover unreadable words and to solve ambiguities.
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David Aldavert, Marçal Rusiñol, Ricardo Toledo, & Josep Llados. (2013). Integrating Visual and Textual Cues for Query-by-String Word Spotting. In 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 511–515).
Abstract: In this paper, we present a word spotting framework that follows the query-by-string paradigm where word images are represented both by textual and visual representations. The textual representation is formulated in terms of character $n$-grams while the visual one is based on the bag-of-visual-words scheme. These two representations are merged together and projected to a sub-vector space. This transform allows to, given a textual query, retrieve word instances that were only represented by the visual modality. Moreover, this statistical representation can be used together with state-of-the-art indexation structures in order to deal with large-scale scenarios. The proposed method is evaluated using a collection of historical documents outperforming state-of-the-art performances.
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Nuria Cirera, Alicia Fornes, & Josep Llados. (2015). Hidden Markov model topology optimization for handwriting recognition. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 626–630).
Abstract: In this paper we present a method to optimize the topology of linear left-to-right hidden Markov models. These models are very popular for sequential signals modeling on tasks such as handwriting recognition. Many topology definition methods select the number of states for a character model based
on character length. This can be a drawback when characters are shorter than the minimum allowed by the model, since they can not be properly trained nor recognized. The proposed method optimizes the number of states per model by automatically including convenient skip-state transitions and therefore it avoids the aforementioned problem.We discuss and compare our method with other character length-based methods such the Fixed, Bakis and Quantile methods. Our proposal performs well on off-line handwriting recognition task.
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Pau Riba, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2015). Handwritten Word Spotting by Inexact Matching of Grapheme Graphs. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 781–785).
Abstract: This paper presents a graph-based word spotting for handwritten documents. Contrary to most word spotting techniques, which use statistical representations, we propose a structural representation suitable to be robust to the inherent deformations of handwriting. Attributed graphs are constructed using a part-based approach. Graphemes extracted from shape convexities are used as stable units of handwriting, and are associated to graph nodes. Then, spatial relations between them determine graph edges. Spotting is defined in terms of an error-tolerant graph matching using bipartite-graph matching algorithm. To make the method usable in large datasets, a graph indexing approach that makes use of binary embeddings is used as preprocessing. Historical documents are used as experimental framework. The approach is comparable to statistical ones in terms of time and memory requirements, especially when dealing with large document collections.
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Jean-Christophe Burie, J. Chazalon, M.Coustaty, S.Eskenazi, Muhammad Muzzamil Luqman, M.Mehri, et al. (2015). ICDAR2015 Competition on Smartphone Document Capture and OCR (SmartDoc). In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 1161–1165).
Abstract: Smartphones are enabling new ways of capture,
hence arises the need for seamless and reliable acquisition and
digitization of documents, in order to convert them to editable,
searchable and a more human-readable format. Current stateof-the-art
works lack databases and baseline benchmarks for
digitizing mobile captured documents. We have organized a
competition for mobile document capture and OCR in order to
address this issue. The competition is structured into two independent
challenges: smartphone document capture, and smartphone
OCR. This report describes the datasets for both challenges
along with their ground truth, details the performance evaluation
protocols which we used, and presents the final results of the
participating methods. In total, we received 13 submissions: 8
for challenge-I, and 5 for challenge-2.
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Marçal Rusiñol, David Aldavert, Ricardo Toledo, & Josep Llados. (2015). Towards Query-by-Speech Handwritten Keyword Spotting. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 501–505).
Abstract: In this paper, we present a new querying paradigm for handwritten keyword spotting. We propose to represent handwritten word images both by visual and audio representations, enabling a query-by-speech keyword spotting system. The two representations are merged together and projected to a common sub-space in the training phase. This transform allows to, given a spoken query, retrieve word instances that were only represented by the visual modality. In addition, the same method can be used backwards at no additional cost to produce a handwritten text-tospeech system. We present our first results on this new querying mechanism using synthetic voices over the George Washington
dataset.
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Hongxing Gao, Marçal Rusiñol, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Josep Llados, R.Jain, & D.Doermann. (2015). Novel Line Verification for Multiple Instance Focused Retrieval in Document Collections. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 481–485).
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Marçal Rusiñol, J. Chazalon, Jean-Marc Ogier, & Josep Llados. (2015). A Comparative Study of Local Detectors and Descriptors for Mobile Document Classification. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 596–600).
Abstract: In this paper we conduct a comparative study of local key-point detectors and local descriptors for the specific task of mobile document classification. A classification architecture based on direct matching of local descriptors is used as baseline for the comparative study. A set of four different key-point
detectors and four different local descriptors are tested in all the possible combinations. The experiments are conducted in a database consisting of 30 model documents acquired on 6 different backgrounds, totaling more than 36.000 test images.
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J. Chazalon, Marçal Rusiñol, Jean-Marc Ogier, & Josep Llados. (2015). A Semi-Automatic Groundtruthing Tool for Mobile-Captured Document Segmentation. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 621–625).
Abstract: This paper presents a novel way to generate groundtruth data for the evaluation of mobile document capture systems, focusing on the first stage of the image processing pipeline involved: document object detection and segmentation in lowquality preview frames. We introduce and describe a simple, robust and fast technique based on color markers which enables a semi-automated annotation of page corners. We also detail a technique for marker removal. Methods and tools presented in the paper were successfully used to annotate, in few hours, 24889
frames in 150 video files for the smartDOC competition at ICDAR 2015
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Dimosthenis Karatzas, Lluis Gomez, A.Nicolaou, Suman Ghosh, Andrew Bagdanov, Masakazu Iwamura, et al. (2015). ICDAR 2015 Competition on Robust Reading. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 1156–1160).
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Lluis Gomez, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2015). Object Proposals for Text Extraction in the Wild. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 206–210).
Abstract: Object Proposals is a recent computer vision technique receiving increasing interest from the research community. Its main objective is to generate a relatively small set of bounding box proposals that are most likely to contain objects of interest. The use of Object Proposals techniques in the scene text understanding field is innovative. Motivated by the success of powerful while expensive techniques to recognize words in a holistic way, Object Proposals techniques emerge as an alternative to the traditional text detectors. In this paper we study to what extent the existing generic Object Proposals methods may be useful for scene text understanding. Also, we propose a new Object Proposals algorithm that is specifically designed for text and compare it with other generic methods in the state of the art. Experiments show that our proposal is superior in its ability of producing good quality word proposals in an efficient way. The source code of our method is made publicly available
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