Abstract: This paper describes an exhaustive comparative analysis and evaluation of different existing texture descriptor algorithms to differentiate between genuine and counterfeit documents. We include in our experiments different categories of algorithms and compare them in different scenarios with several counterfeit datasets, comprising banknotes and identity documents. Computational time in the extraction of each descriptor is important because the final objective is to use it in a real industrial scenario. HoG and CNN based descriptors stands out statistically over the rest in terms of the F1-score/time ratio performance.

Abstract: In this paper we present a crowdsourcing web-based application for extracting information from demographic handwritten document images. The proposed application integrates two points of view: the semantic information for demographic research, and the ground-truthing for document analysis research. Concretely, the application has the contents view, where the information is recorded into forms, and the labeling view, with the word labels for evaluating document analysis techniques. The crowdsourcing architecture allows to accelerate the information extraction (many users can work simultaneously), validate the information, and easily provide feedback to the users. We finally show how the proposed application can be extended to other kind of demographic historical manuscripts.

Abstract: Effective information retrieval on handwritten document images has always been
a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel handwritten word spotting approach based on graph representation. The presented model comprises both topological and morphological signatures of handwriting. Skeleton-based graphs with the Shape Context labeled vertexes are established for connected components. Each word image is represented as a sequence of graphs. In order to be robust to the handwriting variations, an exhaustive merging process based on DTW alignment results introduced in the similarity measure between word images. With respect to the computation complexity, an approximate graph edit distance approach using bipartite matching is employed for graph matching. The experiments on the George Washington dataset and the marriage records from the Barcelona Cathedral dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art structural methods.

Abstract: In this paper we present a method to optimize the topology of linear left-to-right hidden Markov models. These models are very popular for sequential signals modeling on tasks such as handwriting recognition. Many topology definition methods select the number of states for a character model based
on character length. This can be a drawback when characters are shorter than the minimum allowed by the model, since they can not be properly trained nor recognized. The proposed method optimizes the number of states per model by automatically including convenient skip-state transitions and therefore it avoids the aforementioned problem.We discuss and compare our method with other character length-based methods such the Fixed, Bakis and Quantile methods. Our proposal performs well on off-line handwriting recognition task.

Abstract: This chapter describes the most relevant approaches for the analysis of graphical documents. The graphics recognition pipeline can be splitted into three tasks. The low level or lexical task extracts the basic units composing the document. The syntactic level is focused on the structure, i.e., how graphical entities are constructed, and involves the location and classification of the symbols present in the document. The third level is a functional or semantic level, i.e., it models what the graphical symbols do and what they mean in the context where they appear. This chapter covers the lexical level, while the next two chapters are devoted to the syntactic and semantic level, respectively. The main problems reviewed in this chapter are raster-to-vector conversion (vectorization algorithms) and the separation of text and graphics components. The research and industrial communities have provided standard methods achieving reasonable performance levels. Hence, graphics recognition techniques can be considered to be in a mature state from a scientific point of view. Additionally this chapter provides insights on some related problems, namely, the extraction and recognition of dimensions in engineering drawings, and the recognition of hatched and tiled patterns. Both problems are usually associated, even integrated, in the vectorization process.

Abstract: In this paper, we address two complex issues: 1) Text frame classification and 2) Multi-oriented text detection in video text frame. We first divide a video frame into 16 blocks and propose a combination of wavelet and median-moments with k-means clustering at the block level to identify probable text blocks. For each probable text block, the method applies the same combination of feature with k-means clustering over a sliding window running through the blocks to identify potential text candidates. We introduce a new idea of symmetry on text candidates in each block based on the observation that pixel distribution in text exhibits a symmetric pattern. The method integrates all blocks containing text candidates in the frame and then all text candidates are mapped on to a Sobel edge map of the original frame to obtain text representatives. To tackle the multi-orientation problem, we present a new method called Angle Projection Boundary Growing (APBG) which is an iterative algorithm and works based on a nearest neighbor concept. APBG is then applied on the text representatives to fix the bounding box for multi-oriented text lines in the video frame. Directional information is used to eliminate false positives. Experimental results on a variety of datasets such as non-horizontal, horizontal, publicly available data (Hua’s data) and ICDAR-03 competition data (camera images) show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods proposed for video and the state of the art methods for scene text as well.

Abstract: Relatively little research has been done on the topic of patent image retrieval and in general in most of the approaches the retrieval is performed in terms of a similarity measure between the query image and the images in the corpus. However, systems aimed at overcoming the semantic gap between the visual description of patent images and their conveyed concepts would be very helpful for patent professionals. In this paper we present a flowchart recognition method aimed at achieving a structured representation of flowchart images that can be further queried semantically. The proposed method was submitted to the CLEF-IP 2012 flowchart recognition task. We report the obtained results on this dataset.

Abstract: The importance of logos and trademarks in nowadays society is indisputable, variably seen under a positive light as a valuable service for consumers or a negative one as a catalyst of ever-increasing consumerism. This chapter discusses the technical approaches for enabling machines to work with logos, looking into the latest methodologies for logo detection, localization, representation, recognition, retrieval, and spotting in a variety of media. This analysis is presented in the context of three different applications covering the complete depth and breadth of state of the art techniques. These are trademark retrieval systems, logo recognition in document images, and logo detection and removal in images and videos. This chapter, due to the very nature of logos and trademarks, brings together various facets of document image analysis spanning graphical and textual content, while it links document image analysis to other computer vision domains, especially when it comes to the analysis of real-scene videos and images.