Abstract: Despite decades of research in Optical Music Recognition (OMR), the recognition of old handwritten music scores remains a challenge because of the variabilities in the handwriting styles, paper degradation, lack of standard notation, etc. Therefore, the research in OMR systems adapted to the particularities of old manuscripts is crucial to accelerate the conversion of music scores existing in archives into digital libraries, fostering the dissemination and preservation of our music heritage. In this paper we explore the adaptation of sequence-to-sequence models with attention mechanism (used in translation and handwritten text recognition) and the generation of specific synthetic data for recognizing old music scores. The experimental validation demonstrates that our approach is promising, especially when compared with long short-term memory neural networks.

Abstract: Assessing the quality of movements for post-stroke patients during the rehabilitation phase is vital given that there is no standard stroke rehabilitation plan for all the patients. In fact, it depends basically on the patient’s functional independence and its progress along the rehabilitation sessions. To tackle this challenge and make neurorehabilitation more agile, we propose an automatic assessment pipeline that starts by recognising patients’ movements by means of a shallow deep learning architecture, then measuring the movement quality using jerk measure and related measures. A particularity of this work is that the dataset used is clinically relevant, since it represents movements inspired from Fugl-Meyer a well common upper-limb clinical stroke assessment scale for stroke patients. We show that it is possible to detect the contrast between healthy and patients movements in terms of smoothness, besides achieving conclusions about the patients’ progress during the rehabilitation sessions that correspond to the clinicians’ findings about each case.

Abstract: Handwritten document images can be highly affected by degradation for different reasons: Paper ageing, daily-life scenarios (wrinkles, dust, etc.), bad scanning process and so on. These artifacts raise many readability issues for current Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) algorithms and severely devalue their efficiency. In this paper, we propose an end to end architecture based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to recover the degraded documents into a and form. Unlike the most well-known document binarization methods, which try to improve the visual quality of the degraded document, the proposed architecture integrates a handwritten text recognizer that promotes the generated document image to be more readable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use the text information while binarizing handwritten documents. Extensive experiments conducted on degraded Arabic and Latin handwritten documents demonstrate the usefulness of integrating the recognizer within the GAN architecture, which improves both the visual quality and the readability of the degraded document images. Moreover, we outperform the state of the art in H-DIBCO challenges, after fine tuning our pre-trained model with synthetically degraded Latin handwritten images, on this task.

Abstract: The ICDAR 2019 Challenge on “Scanned receipts OCR and key information extraction” (SROIE) covers important aspects related to the automated analysis of scanned receipts. The SROIE tasks play a key role in many document analysis systems and hold significant commercial potential. Although a lot of work has been published over the years on administrative document analysis, the community has advanced relatively slowly, as most datasets have been kept private. One of the key contributions of SROIE to the document analysis community is to offer a first, standardized dataset of 1000 whole scanned receipt images and annotations, as well as an evaluation procedure for such tasks. The Challenge is structured around three tasks, namely Scanned Receipt Text Localization (Task 1), Scanned Receipt OCR (Task 2) and Key Information Extraction from Scanned Receipts (Task 3). The competition opened on 10th February, 2019 and closed on 5th May, 2019. We received 29, 24 and 18 valid submissions received for the three competition tasks, respectively. This report presents the competition datasets, define the tasks and the evaluation protocols, offer detailed submission statistics, as well as an analysis of the submitted performance. While the tasks of text localization and recognition seem to be relatively easy to tackle, it is interesting to observe the variety of ideas and approaches proposed for the information extraction task. According to the submissions' performance we believe there is still margin for improving information extraction performance, although the current dataset would have to grow substantially in following editions. Given the success of the SROIE competition evidenced by the wide interest generated and the healthy number of submissions from academic, research institutes and industry over different countries, we consider that the SROIE competition can evolve into a useful resource for the community, drawing further attention and promoting research and development efforts in this field.

Abstract: Chinese scene text reading is one of the most challenging problems in computer vision and has attracted great interest. Different from English text, Chinese has more than 6000 commonly used characters and Chinesecharacters can be arranged in various layouts with numerous fonts. The Chinese signboards in street view are a good choice for Chinese scene text images since they have different backgrounds, fonts and layouts. We organized a competition called ICDAR2019-ReCTS, which mainly focuses on reading Chinese text on signboard. This report presents the final results of the competition. A large-scale dataset of 25,000 annotated signboard images, in which all the text lines and characters are annotated with locations and transcriptions, were released. Four tasks, namely character recognition, text line recognition, text line detection and end-to-end recognition were set up. Besides, considering the Chinese text ambiguity issue, we proposed a multi ground truth (multi-GT) evaluation method to make evaluation fairer. The competition started on March 1, 2019 and ended on April 30, 2019. 262 submissions from 46 teams are received. Most of the participants come from universities, research institutes, and tech companies in China. There are also some participants from the United States, Australia, Singapore, and Korea. 21 teams submit results for Task 1, 23 teams submit results for Task 2, 24 teams submit results for Task 3, and 13 teams submit results for Task 4.

Abstract: Robust text reading from street view images provides valuable information for various applications. Performance improvement of existing methods in such a challenging scenario heavily relies on the amount of fully annotated training data, which is costly and in-efficient to obtain. To scale up the amount of training data while keeping the labeling procedure cost-effective, this competition introduces a new challenge on Large-scale Street View Text with Partial Labeling (LSVT), providing 50, 000 and 400, 000 images in full and weak annotations, respectively. This competition aims to explore the abilities of state-of-the-art methods to detect and recognize text instances from large-scale street view images, closing the gap between research benchmarks and real applications. During the competition period, a total of 41 teams participated in the two proposed tasks with 132 valid submissions, ie, text detection and end-to-end text spotting. This paper includes dataset descriptions, task definitions, evaluation protocols and results summaries of the ICDAR 2019-LSVT challenge.

Abstract: Current visual question answering datasets do not consider the rich semantic information conveyed by text within an image. In this work, we present a new dataset, ST-VQA, that aims to highlight the importance of exploiting highlevel semantic information present in images as textual cues in the Visual Question Answering process. We use this dataset to define a series of tasks of increasing difficulty for which reading the scene text in the context provided by the visual information is necessary to reason and generate an appropriate answer. We propose a new evaluation metric for these tasks to account both for reasoning errors as well as shortcomings of the text recognition module. In addition we put forward a series of baseline methods, which provide further insight to the newly released dataset, and set the scene for further research.

Abstract: This paper explores the possibilities of image style transfer applied to text maintaining the original transcriptions. Results on different text domains (scene text, machine printed text and handwritten text) and cross-modal results demonstrate that this is feasible, and open different research lines. Furthermore, two architectures for selective style transfer, which means
transferring style to only desired image pixels, are proposed. Finally, scene text selective style transfer is evaluated as a data augmentation technique to expand scene text detection datasets, resulting in a boost of text detectors performance. Our implementation of the described models is publicly available.