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.
|
David Fernandez, Simone Marinai, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2013). Contextual Word Spotting in Historical Manuscripts using Markov Logic Networks. In 2nd International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (pp. 36–43).
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.
|
Pau Riba, Jon Almazan, Alicia Fornes, David Fernandez, Ernest Valveny, & Josep Llados. (2014). e-Crowds: a mobile platform for browsing and searching in historical demographyrelated manuscripts. In 14th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (pp. 228–233).
Abstract: This paper presents a prototype system running on portable devices for browsing and word searching through historical handwritten document collections. The platform adapts the paradigm of eBook reading, where the narrative is not necessarily sequential, but centered on the user actions. The novelty is to replace digitally born books by digitized historical manuscripts of marriage licenses, so document analysis tasks are required in the browser. With an active reading paradigm, the user can cast queries of people names, so he/she can implicitly follow genealogical links. In addition, the system allows combined searches: the user can refine a search by adding more words to search. As a second contribution, the retrieval functionality involves as a core technology a word spotting module with an unified approach, which allows combined query searches, and also two input modalities: query-by-example, and query-by-string.
|
Jon Almazan, Albert Gordo, Alicia Fornes, & Ernest Valveny. (2014). Word Spotting and Recognition with Embedded Attributes. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 36(12), 2552–2566.
Abstract: This article addresses the problems of word spotting and word recognition on images. In word spotting, the goal is to find all instances of a query word in a dataset of images. In recognition, the goal is to recognize the content of the word image, usually aided by a dictionary or lexicon. We describe an approach in which both word images and text strings are embedded in a common vectorial subspace. This is achieved by a combination of label embedding and attributes learning, and a common subspace regression. In this subspace, images and strings that represent the same word are close together, allowing one to cast recognition and retrieval tasks as a nearest neighbor problem. Contrary to most other existing methods, our representation has a fixed length, is low dimensional, and is very fast to compute and, especially, to compare. We test our approach on four public datasets of both handwritten documents and natural images showing results comparable or better than the state-of-the-art on spotting and recognition tasks.
|
Volkmar Frinken, Andreas Fischer, & Carlos David Martinez Hinarejos. (2013). Handwriting Recognition in Historical Documents using Very Large Vocabularies. In 2nd International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (pp. 67–72).
Abstract: Language models are used in automatic transcription system to resolve ambiguities. This is done by limiting the vocabulary of words that can be recognized as well as estimating the n-gram probability of the words in the given text. In the context of historical documents, a non-unified spelling and the limited amount of written text pose a substantial problem for the selection of the recognizable vocabulary as well as the computation of the word probabilities. In this paper we propose for the transcription of historical Spanish text to keep the corpus for the n-gram limited to a sample of the target text, but expand the vocabulary with words gathered from external resources. We analyze the performance of such a transcription system with different sizes of external vocabularies and demonstrate the applicability and the significant increase in recognition accuracy of using up to 300 thousand external words.
|
Marçal Rusiñol, V. Poulain d'Andecy, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Josep Llados. (2013). Classification of Administrative Document Images by Logo Identification. In 10th IAPR International Workshop on Graphics Recognition.
Abstract: This paper is focused on the categorization of administrative document images (such as invoices) based on the recognition of the supplier's graphical logo. Two different methods are proposed, the first one uses a bag-of-visual-words model whereas the second one tries to locate logo images described by the blurred shape model descriptor within documents by a sliding-window technique. Preliminar results are reported with a dataset of real administrative documents.
|
Hongxing Gao, Marçal Rusiñol, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Apostolos Antonacopoulos, & Josep Llados. (2013). An interactive appearance-based document retrieval system for historical newspapers. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (pp. 84–87).
Abstract: In this paper we present a retrieval-based application aimed at assisting a user to semi-automatically segment an incoming flow of historical newspaper images by automatically detecting a particular type of pages based on their appearance. A visual descriptor is used to assess page similarity while a relevance feedback process allow refining the results iteratively. The application is tested on a large dataset of digitised historic newspapers.
|
Marçal Rusiñol, V. Poulain d'Andecy, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Josep Llados. (2014). Classification of Administrative Document Images by Logo Identification. In Bart Lamiroy, & Jean-Marc Ogier (Eds.), Graphics Recognition. Current Trends and Challenges (Vol. 8746, pp. 49–58). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: This paper is focused on the categorization of administrative document images (such as invoices) based on the recognition of the supplier’s graphical logo. Two different methods are proposed, the first one uses a bag-of-visual-words model whereas the second one tries to locate logo images described by the blurred shape model descriptor within documents by a sliding-window technique. Preliminar results are reported with a dataset of real administrative documents.
Keywords: Administrative Document Classification; Logo Recognition; Logo Spotting
|
Antonio Clavelli, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Josep Llados, Mario Ferraro, & Giuseppe Boccignone. (2014). Modelling task-dependent eye guidance to objects in pictures. CoCom - Cognitive Computation, 6(3), 558–584.
Abstract: 5Y Impact Factor: 1.14 / 3rd (Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence)
We introduce a model of attentional eye guidance based on the rationale that the deployment of gaze is to be considered in the context of a general action-perception loop relying on two strictly intertwined processes: sensory processing, depending on current gaze position, identifies sources of information that are most valuable under the given task; motor processing links such information with the oculomotor act by sampling the next gaze position and thus performing the gaze shift. In such a framework, the choice of where to look next is task-dependent and oriented to classes of objects embedded within pictures of complex scenes. The dependence on task is taken into account by exploiting the value and the payoff of gazing at certain image patches or proto-objects that provide a sparse representation of the scene objects. The different levels of the action-perception loop are represented in probabilistic form and eventually give rise to a stochastic process that generates the gaze sequence. This way the model also accounts for statistical properties of gaze shifts such as individual scan path variability. Results of the simulations are compared either with experimental data derived from publicly available datasets and from our own experiments.
Keywords: Visual attention; Gaze guidance; Value; Payoff; Stochastic fixation prediction
|
Hongxing Gao, Marçal Rusiñol, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Josep Llados. (2014). Fast Structural Matching for Document Image Retrieval through Spatial Databases. In Document Recognition and Retrieval XXI (Vol. 9021).
Abstract: The structure of document images plays a signi cant role in document analysis thus considerable e orts have been made towards extracting and understanding document structure, usually in the form of layout analysis approaches. In this paper, we rst employ Distance Transform based MSER (DTMSER) to eciently extract stable document structural elements in terms of a dendrogram of key-regions. Then a fast structural matching method is proposed to query the structure of document (dendrogram) based on a spatial database which facilitates the formulation of advanced spatial queries. The experiments demonstrate a signi cant improvement in a document retrieval scenario when compared to the use of typical Bag of Words (BoW) and pyramidal BoW descriptors.
Keywords: Document image retrieval; distance transform; MSER; spatial database
|
Hongxing Gao, Marçal Rusiñol, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Josep Llados. (2014). Embedding Document Structure to Bag-of-Words through Pair-wise Stable Key-regions. In 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 2903–2908).
Abstract: Since the document structure carries valuable discriminative information, plenty of efforts have been made for extracting and understanding document structure among which layout analysis approaches are the most commonly used. In this paper, Distance Transform based MSER (DTMSER) is employed to efficiently extract the document structure as a dendrogram of key-regions which roughly correspond to structural elements such as characters, words and paragraphs. Inspired by the Bag
of Words (BoW) framework, we propose an efficient method for structural document matching by representing the document image as a histogram of key-region pairs encoding structural relationships.
Applied to the scenario of document image retrieval, experimental results demonstrate a remarkable improvement when comparing the proposed method with typical BoW and pyramidal BoW methods.
|
David Fernandez, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2014). A graph-based approach for segmenting touching lines in historical handwritten documents. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 17(3), 293–312.
Abstract: Text line segmentation in handwritten documents is an important task in the recognition of historical documents. Handwritten document images contain text lines with multiple orientations, touching and overlapping characters between consecutive text lines and different document structures, making line segmentation a difficult task. In this paper, we present a new approach for handwritten text line segmentation solving the problems of touching components, curvilinear text lines and horizontally overlapping components. The proposed algorithm formulates line segmentation as finding the central path in the area between two consecutive lines. This is solved as a graph traversal problem. A graph is constructed using the skeleton of the image. Then, a path-finding algorithm is used to find the optimum path between text lines. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on a comprehensive dataset consisting of five databases: ICDAR2009, ICDAR2013, UMD, the George Washington and the Barcelona Marriages Database. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art considering the different types and difficulties of the benchmarking data.
Keywords: Text line segmentation; Handwritten documents; Document image processing; Historical document analysis
|
David Fernandez, Pau Riba, Alicia Fornes, & Josep Llados. (2014). On the Influence of Key Point Encoding for Handwritten Word Spotting. In 14th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (pp. 476–481).
Abstract: In this paper we evaluate the influence of the selection of key points and the associated features in the performance of word spotting processes. In general, features can be extracted from a number of characteristic points like corners, contours, skeletons, maxima, minima, crossings, etc. A number of descriptors exist in the literature using different interest point detectors. But the intrinsic variability of handwriting vary strongly on the performance if the interest points are not stable enough. In this paper, we analyze the performance of different descriptors for local interest points. As benchmarking dataset we have used the Barcelona Marriage Database that contains handwritten records of marriages over five centuries.
Keywords: Local descriptors; Interest points; Handwritten documents; Word spotting; Historical document analysis
|
David Fernandez, Jon Almazan, Nuria Cirera, Alicia Fornes, & Josep Llados. (2014). BH2M: the Barcelona Historical Handwritten Marriages database. In 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 256–261).
Abstract: This paper presents an image database of historical handwritten marriages records stored in the archives of Barcelona cathedral, and the corresponding meta-data addressed to evaluate the performance of document analysis algorithms. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it presents a complete ground truth which covers the whole pipeline of handwriting
recognition research, from layout analysis to recognition and understanding. Second, it is the first dataset in the emerging area of genealogical document analysis, where documents are manuscripts pseudo-structured with specific lexicons and the interest is beyond pure transcriptions but context dependent.
|
Christophe Rigaud, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Jean-Christophe Burie, & Jean-Marc Ogier. (2014). Color descriptor for content-based drawing retrieval. In 11th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis and Systems (pp. 267–271).
Abstract: Human detection in computer vision field is an active field of research. Extending this to human-like drawings such as the main characters in comic book stories is not trivial. Comics analysis is a very recent field of research at the intersection of graphics, texts, objects and people recognition. The detection of the main comic characters is an essential step towards a fully automatic comic book understanding. This paper presents a color-based approach for comics character retrieval using content-based drawing retrieval and color palette.
|
