Abstract: This report presents the final results of the ICDAR 2013 Robust Reading Competition. The competition is structured in three Challenges addressing text extraction in different application domains, namely born-digital images, real scene images and real-scene videos. The Challenges are organised around specific tasks covering text localisation, text segmentation and word recognition. The competition took place in the first quarter of 2013, and received a total of 42 submissions over the different tasks offered. This report describes the datasets and ground truth specification, details the performance evaluation protocols used and presents the final results along with a brief summary of the participating methods.

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.

Abstract: Non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques are affected by two critical aspects: (i) the design of the adjacency graphs, and (ii) the embedding of new test data-the out-of-sample problem. For the first aspect, the proposed solutions, in general, were heuristically driven. For the second aspect, the difficulty resides in finding an accurate mapping that transfers unseen data samples into an existing manifold. Past works addressing these two aspects were heavily parametric in the sense that the optimal performance is only achieved for a suitable parameter choice that should be known in advance. In this paper, we demonstrate that the sparse representation theory not only serves for automatic graph construction as shown in recent works, but also represents an accurate alternative for out-of-sample embedding. Considering for a case study the Laplacian Eigenmaps, we applied our method to the face recognition problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed out-of-sample embedding, experiments are conducted using the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and Kernel Support Vector Machines (KSVM) classifiers on six public face datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed model is able to achieve high categorization effectiveness as well as high consistency with non-linear embeddings/manifolds obtained in batch modes.

Abstract: Natural languages can often be modelled by suitable grammars whose knowledge can improve the word spotting results. The implicit contextual information is even more useful when dealing with information that is intrinsically described as one collection of records. In this paper, we present one approach to word spotting which uses the contextual information of records to improve the results. The method relies on Markov Logic Networks to probabilistically model the relational organization of handwritten records. The performance has been evaluated on the Barcelona Marriages Dataset that contains structured handwritten records that summarize marriage information.

Abstract: Poster

Abstract: Historical records of daily activities provide intriguing insights into the life of our ancestors, useful for demography studies and genealogical research. Automatic processing of historical documents, however, has mostly been focused on single works of literature and less on social records, which tend to have a distinct layout, structure, and vocabulary. Such information is usually collected by expert demographers that devote a lot of time to manually transcribe them. This paper presents a new database, compiled from a marriage license books collection, to support research in automatic handwriting recognition for historical documents containing social records. Marriage license books are documents that were used for centuries by ecclesiastical institutions to register marriage licenses. Books from this collection are handwritten and span nearly half a millennium until the beginning of the 20th century. In addition, a study is presented about the capability of state-of-the-art handwritten text recognition systems, when applied to the presented database. Baseline results are reported for reference in future studies.

Abstract: The recognition of unconstrained handwriting images is usually based on vectorial representation and statistical classification. Despite their high representational power, graphs are rarely used in this field due to a lack of efficient graph-based recognition methods. Recently, graph similarity features have been proposed to bridge the gap between structural representation and statistical classification by means of vector space embedding. This approach has shown a high performance in terms of accuracy but had shortcomings in terms of computational speed. The time complexity of the Hungarian algorithm that is used to approximate the edit distance between two handwriting graphs is demanding for a real-world scenario. In this paper, we propose a faster graph matching algorithm which is derived from the Hausdorff distance. On the historical Parzival database it is demonstrated that the proposed method achieves a speedup factor of 12.9 without significant loss in recognition accuracy.