Abstract: Despite decades of research in Optical Music Recognition (OMR), the recognition of old handwritten music scores remains a challenge because of the variabilities in the handwriting styles, paper degradation, lack of standard notation, etc. Therefore, the research in OMR systems adapted to the particularities of old manuscripts is crucial to accelerate the conversion of music scores existing in archives into digital libraries, fostering the dissemination and preservation of our music heritage. In this paper we explore the adaptation of sequence-to-sequence models with attention mechanism (used in translation and handwritten text recognition) and the generation of specific synthetic data for recognizing old music scores. The experimental validation demonstrates that our approach is promising, especially when compared with long short-term memory neural networks.

Abstract: Variable rate is a requirement for flexible and adaptable image and video compression. However, deep image compression methods (DIC) are optimized for a single fixed rate-distortion (R-D) tradeoff. While this can be addressed by training multiple models for different tradeoffs, the memory requirements increase proportionally to the number of models. Scaling the bottleneck representation of a shared autoencoder can provide variable rate compression with a single shared autoencoder. However, the R-D performance using this simple mechanism degrades in low bitrates, and also shrinks the effective range of bitrates. To address these limitations, we formulate the problem of variable R-D optimization for DIC, and propose modulated autoencoders (MAEs), where the representations of a shared autoencoder are adapted to the specific R-D tradeoff via a modulation network. Jointly training this modulated autoencoder and the modulation network provides an effective way to navigate the R-D operational curve. Our experiments show that the proposed method can achieve almost the same R-D performance of independent models with significantly fewer parameters.

Abstract: Despite being very successful within the pattern recognition and machine learning community, graph-based methods are often unusable because of the lack of mathematical operations defined in graph domain. Graph embedding, which maps graphs to a vectorial space, has been proposed as a way to tackle these difficulties enabling the use of standard machine learning techniques. However, it is well known that graph embedding functions usually suffer from the loss of structural information. In this paper, we consider the hierarchical structure of a graph as a way to mitigate this loss of information. The hierarchical structure is constructed by topologically clustering the graph nodes and considering each cluster as a node in the upper hierarchical level. Once this hierarchical structure is constructed, we consider several configurations to define the mapping into a vector space given a classical graph embedding, in particular, we propose to make use of the stochastic graphlet embedding (SGE). Broadly speaking, SGE produces a distribution of uniformly sampled low-to-high-order graphlets as a way to embed graphs into the vector space. In what follows, the coarse-to-fine structure of a graph hierarchy and the statistics fetched by the SGE complements each other and includes important structural information with varied contexts. Altogether, these two techniques substantially cope with the usual information loss involved in graph embedding techniques, obtaining a more robust graph representation. This fact has been corroborated through a detailed experimental evaluation on various benchmark graph datasets, where we outperform the state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract: Manual transcription of handwritten text is a time consuming task. In the case of encrypted manuscripts, the recognition is even more complex due to the huge variety of alphabets and symbol sets. To speed up and ease this process, we present a web-based tool aimed to (semi)-automatically transcribe the encrypted sources. The user uploads one or several images of the desired encrypted document(s) as input, and the system returns the transcription(s). This process is carried out in an interactive fashion with
the user to obtain more accurate results. For discovering and testing, the developed web tool is freely available.

Abstract: When transcribing handwritten document images, inaccuracies in the text segmentation step often cause errors in the subsequent transcription step. For this reason, some recent methods propose to perform the recognition at paragraph level. But still, errors in the segmentation of paragraphs can affect
the transcription performance. In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework to transcribe full pages. The joint text detection and transcription allows to remove the layout analysis requirement at test time. The experimental results show that our approach can achieve comparable results to models that assume
segmented paragraphs, and suggest that joining the two tasks brings an improvement over doing the two tasks separately.

Abstract: Tabular structures in documents offer a complementary dimension to the raw textual data, representing logical or quantitative relationships among pieces of information. In digital mail room applications, where a large amount of
administrative documents must be processed with reasonable accuracy, the detection and interpretation of tables is crucial. Table recognition has gained interest in document image analysis, in particular in unconstrained formats (absence of rule lines, unknown information of rows and columns). In this work, we propose a graph-based approach for detecting tables in document images. Instead of using the raw content (recognized text), we make use of the location, context and content type, thus it is purely a structure perception approach, not dependent on the language and the quality of the text
reading. Our framework makes use of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in order to describe the local repetitive structural information of tables in invoice documents. Our proposed model has been experimentally validated in two invoice datasets and achieved encouraging results. Additionally, due to the scarcity
of benchmark datasets for this task, we have contributed to the community a novel dataset derived from the RVL-CDIP invoice data. It will be publicly released to facilitate future research.