Abstract: Reading seal title text is a challenging task due to the variable shapes of seals, curved text, background noise, and overlapped text. However, this important element is commonly found in official and financial scenarios, and has not received the attention it deserves in the field of OCR technology. To promote research in this area, we organized ICDAR 2023 competition on reading the seal title (ReST), which included two tasks: seal title text detection (Task 1) and end-to-end seal title recognition (Task 2). We constructed a dataset of 10,000 real seal data, covering the most common classes of seals, and labeled all seal title texts with text polygons and text contents. The competition opened on 30th December, 2022 and closed on 20th March, 2023. The competition attracted 53 participants and received 135 submissions from academia and industry, including 28 participants and 72 submissions for Task 1, and 25 participants and 63 submissions for Task 2, which demonstrated significant interest in this challenging task. In this report, we present an overview of the competition, including the organization, challenges, and results. We describe the dataset and tasks, and summarize the submissions and evaluation results. The results show that significant progress has been made in the field of seal title text reading, and we hope that this competition will inspire further research and development in this important area of OCR technology.

Abstract: Evaluation of the performance and limitations of medical imaging algorithms is essential to estimate their impact in social, economic or clinical aspects. However, validation of medical imaging techniques is a challenging task due to the variety of imaging and clinical problems involved, as well as, the difficulties for systematically extracting a reliable solely ground truth. Although specific validation protocols are reported in any medical imaging paper, there are still two major concerns: definition of standardized methodologies transversal to all problems and generalization of conclusions to the whole clinical data set.
We claim that both issues would be fully solved if we had a statistical model relating ground truth and the output of computational imaging techniques. Such a statistical model could conclude to what extent the algorithm behaves like the ground truth from the analysis of a sampling of the validation data set. We present a statistical inference framework reporting the agreement and describing the relationship of two quantities. We show its transversality by applying it to validation of two different tasks: contour segmentation and landmark correspondence.

Abstract: The manuscript evaluates the performance of a monocular visual odometry approach when images from different spectra are considered, both independently and fused. The objective behind this evaluation is to analyze if classical approaches can be improved when the given images, which are from different spectra, are fused and represented in new domains. The images in these new domains should have some of the following properties: i) more robust to noisy data; ii) less sensitive to changes (e.g., lighting); iii) more rich in descriptive information, among other. In particular in the current work two different image fusion strategies are considered. Firstly, images from the visible and thermal spectrum are fused using a Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) approach. Secondly, a monochrome threshold strategy is considered. The obtained
representations are evaluated under a visual odometry framework, highlighting
their advantages and disadvantages, using different urban and semi-urban scenarios. Comparisons with both monocular-visible spectrum and monocular-infrared spectrum, are also provided showing the validity of the proposed approach.

Abstract: This paper unveils the discoveries and outcomes of the inaugural iteration of the Multi-modal Aerial View Image Challenge (MAVIC) aimed at image translation. The primary objective of this competition is to stimulate research efforts towards the development of models capable of translating co-aligned images between multiple modalities. To accomplish the task of image translation, the competition utilizes images obtained from both synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and electro-optical (EO) sources. Specifically, the challenge centers on the translation from the SAR modality to the EO modality, an area of research that has garnered attention. The inaugural challenge demonstrates the feasibility of the task. The dataset utilized in this challenge is derived from the UNIfied COincident Optical and Radar for recognitioN (UNICORN) dataset. We introduce an new version of the UNICORN dataset that is focused on enabling the sensor translation task. Performance evaluation is conducted using a combination of measures to ensure high fidelity and high accuracy translations.

Abstract: Error-correcting output codes (ECOC) represents a powerful framework to deal with multiclass classification problems based on combining binary classifiers. The key factor affecting the performance of ECOC methods is the independence of binary classifiers, without which the ECOC method would be ineffective. In spite of its ability on classification of problems with relatively large number of classes, it has been applied in few real world problems. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of the ECOC approach on two image vision problems: logo recognition and shape classification using Decision Tree and AdaBoost as the base learners. The results show that the ECOC method can be used to improve the classification performance in comparison with the classical multiclass approaches.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel methodology to compute a 3D scene
representation. The algorithm uses macro scale polygonal primitives to model the scene. This means that the representation of the scene is given as a list of large scale polygons that describe the geometric structure of the environment. Results show that the approach is capable of producing accurate descriptions of the scene. In addition, the algorithm is very efficient when compared to other techniques.