Jon Almazan, Albert Gordo, Alicia Fornes, & Ernest Valveny. (2013). Handwritten Word Spotting with Corrected Attributes. In 15th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (pp. 1017–1024).
Abstract: We propose an approach to multi-writer word spotting, where the goal is to find a query word in a dataset comprised of document images. We propose an attributes-based approach that leads to a low-dimensional, fixed-length representation of the word images that is fast to compute and, especially, fast to compare. This approach naturally leads to an unified representation of word images and strings, which seamlessly allows one to indistinctly perform query-by-example, where the query is an image, and query-by-string, where the query is a string. We also propose a calibration scheme to correct the attributes scores based on Canonical Correlation Analysis that greatly improves the results on a challenging dataset. We test our approach on two public datasets showing state-of-the-art results.
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Francisco Cruz, & Oriol Ramos Terrades. (2013). Handwritten Line Detection via an EM Algorithm. In 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 718–722).
Abstract: In this paper we present a handwritten line segmentation method devised to work on documents composed of several paragraphs with multiple line orientations. The method is based on a variation of the EM algorithm for the estimation of a set of regression lines between the connected components that compose the image. We evaluated our method on the ICDAR2009 handwriting segmentation contest dataset with promising results that overcome most of the presented methods. In addition, we prove the usability of the presented method by performing line segmentation on the George Washington database obtaining encouraging results.
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Jon Almazan, Alicia Fornes, & Ernest Valveny. (2013). A Deformable HOG-based Shape Descriptor. In 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 1022–1026).
Abstract: In this paper we deal with the problem of recognizing handwritten shapes. We present a new deformable feature extraction method that adapts to the shape to be described, dealing in this way with the variability introduced in the handwriting domain. It consists in a selection of the regions that best define the shape to be described, followed by the computation of histograms of oriented gradients-based features over these points. Our results significantly outperform other descriptors in the literature for the task of hand-drawn shape recognition and handwritten word retrieval
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Lluis Gomez. (2012). Perceptual Organization for Text Extraction in Natural Scenes (Vol. 173). Master's thesis, , .
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Albert Gordo, Alicia Fornes, & Ernest Valveny. (2013). Writer identification in handwritten musical scores with bags of notes. PR - Pattern Recognition, 46(5), 1337–1345.
Abstract: Writer Identification is an important task for the automatic processing of documents. However, the identification of the writer in graphical documents is still challenging. In this work, we adapt the Bag of Visual Words framework to the task of writer identification in handwritten musical scores. A vanilla implementation of this method already performs comparably to the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we analyze the effect of two improvements of the representation: a Bhattacharyya embedding, which improves the results at virtually no extra cost, and a Fisher Vector representation that very significantly improves the results at the cost of a more complex and costly representation. Experimental evaluation shows results more than 20 points above the state-of-the-art in a new, challenging dataset.
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Antonio Clavelli, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Josep Llados, Mario Ferraro, & Giuseppe Boccignone. (2013). Towards Modelling an Attention-Based Text Localization Process. In 6th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (Vol. 7887, pp. 296–303). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: This note introduces a visual attention model of text localization in real-world scenes. The core of the model built upon the proto-object concept is discussed. It is shown how such dynamic mid-level representation of the scene can be derived in the framework of an action-perception loop engaging salience, text information value computation, and eye guidance mechanisms.
Preliminary results that compare model generated scanpaths with those eye-tracked from human subjects are presented.
Keywords: text localization; visual attention; eye guidance
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Jaume Gibert, Ernest Valveny, & Horst Bunke. (2013). Embedding of Graphs with Discrete Attributes Via Label Frequencies. IJPRAI - International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, 27(3), 1360002–1360029.
Abstract: Graph-based representations of patterns are very flexible and powerful, but they are not easily processed due to the lack of learning algorithms in the domain of graphs. Embedding a graph into a vector space solves this problem since graphs are turned into feature vectors and thus all the statistical learning machinery becomes available for graph input patterns. In this work we present a new way of embedding discrete attributed graphs into vector spaces using node and edge label frequencies. The methodology is experimentally tested on graph classification problems, using patterns of different nature, and it is shown to be competitive to state-of-the-art classification algorithms for graphs, while being computationally much more efficient.
Keywords: Discrete attributed graphs; graph embedding; graph classification
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Albert Gordo. (2013). Document Image Representation, Classification and Retrieval in Large-Scale Domains (Ernest Valveny, & Florent Perronnin, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Despite the “paperless office” ideal that started in the decade of the seventies, businesses still strive against an increasing amount of paper documentation. Companies still receive huge amounts of paper documentation that need to be analyzed and processed, mostly in a manual way. A solution for this task consists in, first, automatically scanning the incoming documents. Then, document images can be analyzed and information can be extracted from the data. Documents can also be automatically dispatched to the appropriate workflows, used to retrieve similar documents in the dataset to transfer information, etc.
Due to the nature of this “digital mailroom”, we need document representation methods to be general, i.e., able to cope with very different types of documents. We need the methods to be sound, i.e., able to cope with unexpected types of documents, noise, etc. And, we need to methods to be scalable, i.e., able to cope with thousands or millions of documents that need to be processed, stored, and consulted. Unfortunately, current techniques of document representation, classification and retrieval are not apt for this digital mailroom framework, since they do not fulfill some or all of these requirements.
Through this thesis we focus on the problem of document representation aimed at classification and retrieval tasks under this digital mailroom framework. We first propose a novel document representation based on runlength histograms, and extend it to cope with more complex documents such as multiple-page documents, or documents that contain more sources of information such as extracted OCR text. Then we focus on the scalability requirements and propose a novel binarization method which we dubbed PCAE, as well as two general asymmetric distances between binary embeddings that can significantly improve the retrieval results at a minimal extra computational cost. Finally, we note the importance of supervised learning when performing large-scale retrieval, and study several approaches that can significantly boost the results at no extra cost at query time.
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Muhammad Muzzamil Luqman, Jean-Yves Ramel, & Josep Llados. (2013). Multilevel Analysis of Attributed Graphs for Explicit Graph Embedding in Vector Spaces. In Graph Embedding for Pattern Analysis (pp. 1–26). Springer New York.
Abstract: Ability to recognize patterns is among the most crucial capabilities of human beings for their survival, which enables them to employ their sophisticated neural and cognitive systems [1], for processing complex audio, visual, smell, touch, and taste signals. Man is the most complex and the best existing system of pattern recognition. Without any explicit thinking, we continuously compare, classify, and identify huge amount of signal data everyday [2], starting from the time we get up in the morning till the last second we fall asleep. This includes recognizing the face of a friend in a crowd, a spoken word embedded in noise, the proper key to lock the door, smell of coffee, the voice of a favorite singer, the recognition of alphabetic characters, and millions of more tasks that we perform on regular basis.
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Jean-Marc Ogier, Wenyin Liu, & Josep Llados (Eds.). (2010). Graphics Recognition: Achievements, Challenges, and Evolution (Vol. 6020). LNCS. Springer Link.
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Marçal Rusiñol, R.Roset, Josep Llados, & C.Montaner. (2011). Automatic Index Generation of Digitized Map Series by Coordinate Extraction and Interpretation. In In Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Digital Technologies in Cartographic Heritage.
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Jon Almazan, Alicia Fornes, & Ernest Valveny. (2012). A non-rigid appearance model for shape description and recognition. PR - Pattern Recognition, 45(9), 3105–3113.
Abstract: In this paper we describe a framework to learn a model of shape variability in a set of patterns. The framework is based on the Active Appearance Model (AAM) and permits to combine shape deformations with appearance variability. We have used two modifications of the Blurred Shape Model (BSM) descriptor as basic shape and appearance features to learn the model. These modifications permit to overcome the rigidity of the original BSM, adapting it to the deformations of the shape to be represented. We have applied this framework to representation and classification of handwritten digits and symbols. We show that results of the proposed methodology outperform the original BSM approach.
Keywords: Shape recognition; Deformable models; Shape modeling; Hand-drawn recognition
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Jon Almazan, David Fernandez, Alicia Fornes, Josep Llados, & Ernest Valveny. (2012). A Coarse-to-Fine Approach for Handwritten Word Spotting in Large Scale Historical Documents Collection. In 13th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (pp. 453–458).
Abstract: In this paper we propose an approach for word spotting in handwritten document images. We state the problem from a focused retrieval perspective, i.e. locating instances of a query word in a large scale dataset of digitized manuscripts. We combine two approaches, namely one based on word segmentation and another one segmentation-free. The first approach uses a hashing strategy to coarsely prune word images that are unlikely to be instances of the query word. This process is fast but has a low precision due to the errors introduced in the segmentation step. The regions containing candidate words are sent to the second process based on a state of the art technique from the visual object detection field. This discriminative model represents the appearance of the query word and computes a similarity score. In this way we propose a coarse-to-fine approach achieving a compromise between efficiency and accuracy. The validation of the model is shown using a collection of old handwritten manuscripts. We appreciate a substantial improvement in terms of precision regarding the previous proposed method with a low computational cost increase.
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Jon Almazan, Albert Gordo, Alicia Fornes, & Ernest Valveny. (2012). Efficient Exemplar Word Spotting. In 23rd British Machine Vision Conference (67.pp. 1–67.11).
Abstract: In this paper we propose an unsupervised segmentation-free method for word spotting in document images.
Documents are represented with a grid of HOG descriptors, and a sliding window approach is used to locate the document regions that are most similar to the query. We use the exemplar SVM framework to produce a better representation of the query in an unsupervised way. Finally, the document descriptors are precomputed and compressed with Product Quantization. This offers two advantages: first, a large number of documents can be kept in RAM memory at the same time. Second, the sliding window becomes significantly faster since distances between quantized HOG descriptors can be precomputed. Our results significantly outperform other segmentation-free methods in the literature, both in accuracy and in speed and memory usage.
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Jaume Gibert, Ernest Valveny, & Horst Bunke. (2012). Graph Embedding in Vector Spaces by Node Attribute Statistics. PR - Pattern Recognition, 45(9), 3072–3083.
Abstract: Graph-based representations are of broad use and applicability in pattern recognition. They exhibit, however, a major drawback with regards to the processing tools that are available in their domain. Graphembedding into vectorspaces is a growing field among the structural pattern recognition community which aims at providing a feature vector representation for every graph, and thus enables classical statistical learning machinery to be used on graph-based input patterns. In this work, we propose a novel embedding methodology for graphs with continuous nodeattributes and unattributed edges. The approach presented in this paper is based on statistics of the node labels and the edges between them, based on their similarity to a set of representatives. We specifically deal with an important issue of this methodology, namely, the selection of a suitable set of representatives. In an experimental evaluation, we empirically show the advantages of this novel approach in the context of different classification problems using several databases of graphs.
Keywords: Structural pattern recognition; Graph embedding; Data clustering; Graph classification
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