Suman Ghosh, & Ernest Valveny. (2015). Query by String word spotting based on character bi-gram indexing. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 881–885).
Abstract: In this paper we propose a segmentation-free query by string word spotting method. Both the documents and query strings are encoded using a recently proposed word representa- tion that projects images and strings into a common atribute space based on a pyramidal histogram of characters(PHOC). These attribute models are learned using linear SVMs over the Fisher Vector representation of the images along with the PHOC labels of the corresponding strings. In order to search through the whole page, document regions are indexed per character bi- gram using a similar attribute representation. On top of that, we propose an integral image representation of the document using a simplified version of the attribute model for efficient computation. Finally we introduce a re-ranking step in order to boost retrieval performance. We show state-of-the-art results for segmentation-free query by string word spotting in single-writer and multi-writer standard datasets
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Suman Ghosh, & Ernest Valveny. (2015). A Sliding Window Framework for Word Spotting Based on Word Attributes. In Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, Proceedings of 7th Iberian Conference , ibPRIA 2015 (Vol. 9117, pp. 652–661). LNCS. Springer International Publishing.
Abstract: In this paper we propose a segmentation-free approach to word spotting. Word images are first encoded into feature vectors using Fisher Vector. Then, these feature vectors are used together with pyramidal histogram of characters labels (PHOC) to learn SVM-based attribute models. Documents are represented by these PHOC based word attributes. To efficiently compute the word attributes over a sliding window, we propose to use an integral image representation of the document using a simplified version of the attribute model. Finally we re-rank the top word candidates using the more discriminative full version of the word attributes. We show state-of-the-art results for segmentation-free query-by-example word spotting in single-writer and multi-writer standard datasets.
Keywords: Word spotting; Sliding window; Word attributes
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R. Bertrand, Oriol Ramos Terrades, P. Gomez-Kramer, P. Franco, & Jean-Marc Ogier. (2015). A Conditional Random Field model for font forgery detection. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 576–580).
Abstract: Nowadays, document forgery is becoming a real issue. A large amount of documents that contain critical information as payment slips, invoices or contracts, are constantly subject to fraudster manipulation because of the lack of security regarding this kind of document. Previously, a system to detect fraudulent documents based on its intrinsic features has been presented. It was especially designed to retrieve copy-move forgery and imperfection due to fraudster manipulation. However, when a set of characters is not present in the original document, copy-move forgery is not feasible. Hence, the fraudster will use a text toolbox to add or modify information in the document by imitating the font or he will cut and paste characters from another document where the font properties are similar. This often results in font type errors. Thus, a clue to detect document forgery consists of finding characters, words or sentences in a document with font properties different from their surroundings. To this end, we present in this paper an automatic forgery detection method based on document font features. Using the Conditional Random Field a measurement of probability that a character belongs to a specific font is made by comparing the character font features to a knowledge database. Then, the character is classified as a genuine or a fake one by comparing its probability to belong to a certain font type with those of the neighboring characters.
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Marçal Rusiñol, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Josep Llados. (2015). Automatic Verification of Properly Signed Multi-page Document Images. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Symposium on Visual Computing (Vol. 9475, pp. 327–336). LNCS, 9475.
Abstract: In this paper we present an industrial application for the automatic screening of incoming multi-page documents in a banking workflow aimed at determining whether these documents are properly signed or not. The proposed method is divided in three main steps. First individual pages are classified in order to identify the pages that should contain a signature. In a second step, we segment within those key pages the location where the signatures should appear. The last step checks whether the signatures are present or not. Our method is tested in a real large-scale environment and we report the results when checking two different types of real multi-page contracts, having in total more than 14,500 pages.
Keywords: Document Image; Manual Inspection; Signature Verification; Rejection Criterion; Document Flow
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Alicia Fornes, V.C.Kieu, M. Visani, N.Journet, & Anjan Dutta. (2014). The ICDAR/GREC 2013 Music Scores Competition: Staff Removal. In B.Lamiroy, & J.-M. Ogier (Eds.), Graphics Recognition. Current Trends and Challenges (Vol. 8746, pp. 207–220). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: The first competition on music scores that was organized at ICDAR and GREC in 2011 awoke the interest of researchers, who participated in both staff removal and writer identification tasks. In this second edition, we focus on the staff removal task and simulate a real case scenario concerning old and degraded music scores. For this purpose, we have generated a new set of semi-synthetic images using two degradation models that we previously introduced: local noise and 3D distortions. In this extended paper we provide an extended description of the dataset, degradation models, evaluation metrics, the participant’s methods and the obtained results that could not be presented at ICDAR and GREC proceedings due to page limitations.
Keywords: Competition; Graphics recognition; Music scores; Writer identification; Staff removal
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Lluis Pere de las Heras, Oriol Ramos Terrades, & Josep Llados. (2015). Attributed Graph Grammar for floor plan analysis. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 726–730).
Abstract: In this paper, we propose the use of an Attributed Graph Grammar as unique framework to model and recognize the structure of floor plans. This grammar represents a building as a hierarchical composition of structurally and semantically related elements, where common representations are learned stochastically from annotated data. Given an input image, the parsing consists on constructing that graph representation that better agrees with the probabilistic model defined by the grammar. The proposed method provides several advantages with respect to the traditional floor plan analysis techniques. It uses an unsupervised statistical approach for detecting walls that adapts to different graphical notations and relaxes strong structural assumptions such are straightness and orthogonality. Moreover, the independence between the knowledge model and the parsing implementation allows the method to learn automatically different building configurations and thus, to cope the existing variability. These advantages are clearly demonstrated by comparing it with the most recent floor plan interpretation techniques on 4 datasets of real floor plans with different notations.
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Lluis Pere de las Heras, Oriol Ramos Terrades, Josep Llados, David Fernandez, & Cristina Cañero. (2015). Use case visual Bag-of-Words techniques for camera based identity document classification. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 721–725).
Abstract: Nowadays, automatic identity document recognition, including passport and driving license recognition, is at the core of many applications within the administrative and service sectors, such as police, hospitality, car renting, etc. In former years, the document information was manually extracted whereas today this data is recognized automatically from images obtained by flat-bed scanners. Yet, since these scanners tend to be expensive and voluminous, companies in the sector have recently turned their attention to cheaper, small and yet computationally powerful scanners: the mobile devices. The document identity recognition from mobile images enclose several new difficulties w.r.t traditional scanned images, such as the loss of a controlled background, perspective, blurring, etc. In this paper we present a real application for identity document classification of images taken from mobile devices. This classification process is of extreme importance since a prior knowledge of the document type and origin strongly facilitates the subsequent information extraction. The proposed method is based on a traditional Bagof-Words in which we have taken into consideration several key aspects to enhance recognition rate. The method performance has been studied on three datasets containing more than 2000 images from 129 different document classes.
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Pau Riba, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2015). Handwritten Word Spotting by Inexact Matching of Grapheme Graphs. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 781–785).
Abstract: This paper presents a graph-based word spotting for handwritten documents. Contrary to most word spotting techniques, which use statistical representations, we propose a structural representation suitable to be robust to the inherent deformations of handwriting. Attributed graphs are constructed using a part-based approach. Graphemes extracted from shape convexities are used as stable units of handwriting, and are associated to graph nodes. Then, spatial relations between them determine graph edges. Spotting is defined in terms of an error-tolerant graph matching using bipartite-graph matching algorithm. To make the method usable in large datasets, a graph indexing approach that makes use of binary embeddings is used as preprocessing. Historical documents are used as experimental framework. The approach is comparable to statistical ones in terms of time and memory requirements, especially when dealing with large document collections.
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Dimosthenis Karatzas, Lluis Gomez, Anguelos Nicolaou, Suman Ghosh, Andrew Bagdanov, Masakazu Iwamura, et al. (2015). ICDAR 2015 Competition on Robust Reading. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 1156–1160).
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Lluis Gomez, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2015). Object Proposals for Text Extraction in the Wild. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 206–210).
Abstract: Object Proposals is a recent computer vision technique receiving increasing interest from the research community. Its main objective is to generate a relatively small set of bounding box proposals that are most likely to contain objects of interest. The use of Object Proposals techniques in the scene text understanding field is innovative. Motivated by the success of powerful while expensive techniques to recognize words in a holistic way, Object Proposals techniques emerge as an alternative to the traditional text detectors. In this paper we study to what extent the existing generic Object Proposals methods may be useful for scene text understanding. Also, we propose a new Object Proposals algorithm that is specifically designed for text and compare it with other generic methods in the state of the art. Experiments show that our proposal is superior in its ability of producing good quality word proposals in an efficient way. The source code of our method is made publicly available
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J. Chazalon, Marçal Rusiñol, & Jean-Marc Ogier. (2015). Improving Document Matching Performance by Local Descriptor Filtering. In 6th IAPR International Workshop on Camera Based Document Analysis and Recognition CBDAR2015 (pp. 1216–1220).
Abstract: In this paper we propose an effective method aimed at reducing the amount of local descriptors to be indexed in a document matching framework. In an off-line training stage, the matching between the model document and incoming images is computed retaining the local descriptors from the model that steadily produce good matches. We have evaluated this approach by using the ICDAR2015 SmartDOC dataset containing near 25 000 images from documents to be captured by a mobile device. We have tested the performance of this filtering step by using
ORB and SIFT local detectors and descriptors. The results show an important gain both in quality of the final matching as well as in time and space requirements.
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Jean-Christophe Burie, J. Chazalon, M. Coustaty, S. Eskenazi, Muhammad Muzzamil Luqman, M. Mehri, et al. (2015). ICDAR2015 Competition on Smartphone Document Capture and OCR (SmartDoc). In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 1161–1165).
Abstract: Smartphones are enabling new ways of capture,
hence arises the need for seamless and reliable acquisition and
digitization of documents, in order to convert them to editable,
searchable and a more human-readable format. Current stateof-the-art
works lack databases and baseline benchmarks for
digitizing mobile captured documents. We have organized a
competition for mobile document capture and OCR in order to
address this issue. The competition is structured into two independent
challenges: smartphone document capture, and smartphone
OCR. This report describes the datasets for both challenges
along with their ground truth, details the performance evaluation
protocols which we used, and presents the final results of the
participating methods. In total, we received 13 submissions: 8
for challenge-I, and 5 for challenge-2.
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Hongxing Gao, Marçal Rusiñol, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Josep Llados, R.Jain, & D.Doermann. (2015). Novel Line Verification for Multiple Instance Focused Retrieval in Document Collections. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 481–485).
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G.Thorvaldsen, Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora, T.Andersen, L.Eikvil, Josep Llados, Alicia Fornes, et al. (2015). A Tale of two Transcriptions. Historical Life Course Studies, 1–19.
Abstract: non-indexed
This article explains how two projects implement semi-automated transcription routines: for census sheets in Norway and marriage protocols from Barcelona. The Spanish system was created to transcribe the marriage license books from 1451 to 1905 for the Barcelona area; one of the world’s longest series of preserved vital records. Thus, in the Project “Five Centuries of Marriages” (5CofM) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s Center for Demographic Studies, the Barcelona Historical Marriage Database has been built. More than 600,000 records were transcribed by 150 transcribers working online. The Norwegian material is cross-sectional as it is the 1891 census, recorded on one sheet per person. This format and the underlining of keywords for several variables made it more feasible to semi-automate data entry than when many persons are listed on the same page. While Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for printed text is scientifically mature, computer vision research is now focused on more difficult problems such as handwriting recognition. In the marriage project, document analysis methods have been proposed to automatically recognize the marriage licenses. Fully automatic recognition is still a challenge, but some promising results have been obtained. In Spain, Norway and elsewhere the source material is available as scanned pictures on the Internet, opening up the possibility for further international cooperation concerning automating the transcription of historic source materials. Like what is being done in projects to digitize printed materials, the optimal solution is likely to be a combination of manual transcription and machine-assisted recognition also for hand-written sources.
Keywords: Nominative Sources; Census; Vital Records; Computer Vision; Optical Character Recognition; Word Spotting
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Volkmar Frinken, Andreas Fischer, Markus Baumgartner, & Horst Bunke. (2014). Keyword spotting for self-training of BLSTM NN based handwriting recognition systems. PR - Pattern Recognition, 47(3), 1073–1082.
Abstract: The automatic transcription of unconstrained continuous handwritten text requires well trained recognition systems. The semi-supervised paradigm introduces the concept of not only using labeled data but also unlabeled data in the learning process. Unlabeled data can be gathered at little or not cost. Hence it has the potential to reduce the need for labeling training data, a tedious and costly process. Given a weak initial recognizer trained on labeled data, self-training can be used to recognize unlabeled data and add words that were recognized with high confidence to the training set for re-training. This process is not trivial and requires great care as far as selecting the elements that are to be added to the training set is concerned. In this paper, we propose to use a bidirectional long short-term memory neural network handwritten recognition system for keyword spotting in order to select new elements. A set of experiments shows the high potential of self-training for bootstrapping handwriting recognition systems, both for modern and historical handwritings, and demonstrate the benefits of using keyword spotting over previously published self-training schemes.
Keywords: Document retrieval; Keyword spotting; Handwriting recognition; Neural networks; Semi-supervised learning
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