Abstract: Manual transcription of handwritten text is a time consuming task. In the case of encrypted manuscripts, the recognition is even more complex due to the huge variety of alphabets and symbol sets. To speed up and ease this process, we present a web-based tool aimed to (semi)-automatically transcribe the encrypted sources. The user uploads one or several images of the desired encrypted document(s) as input, and the system returns the transcription(s). This process is carried out in an interactive fashion with
the user to obtain more accurate results. For discovering and testing, the developed web tool is freely available.

Abstract: Infographics communicate information using a combination of textual, graphical and visual elements. This work explores the automatic understanding of infographic images by using a Visual Question Answering technique. To this end, we present InfographicVQA, a new dataset comprising a diverse collection of infographics and question-answer annotations. The questions require methods that jointly reason over the document layout, textual content, graphical elements, and data visualizations. We curate the dataset with an emphasis on questions that require elementary reasoning and basic arithmetic skills. For VQA on the dataset, we evaluate two Transformer-based strong baselines. Both the baselines yield unsatisfactory results compared to near perfect human performance on the dataset. The results suggest that VQA on infographics--images that are designed to communicate information quickly and clearly to human brain--is ideal for benchmarking machine understanding of complex document images. The dataset is available for download at docvqa. org

Abstract: The task of image-text matching aims to map representations from different modalities into a common joint visual-textual embedding. However, the most widely used datasets for this task, MSCOCO and Flickr30K, are actually image captioning datasets that offer a very limited set of relationships between images and sentences in their ground-truth annotations. This limited ground truth information forces us to use evaluation metrics based on binary relevance: given a sentence query we consider only one image as relevant. However, many other relevant images or captions may be present in the dataset. In this work, we propose two metrics that evaluate the degree of semantic relevance of retrieved items, independently of their annotated binary relevance. Additionally, we incorporate a novel strategy that uses an image captioning metric, CIDEr, to define a Semantic Adaptive Margin (SAM) to be optimized in a standard triplet loss. By incorporating our formulation to existing models, a large improvement is obtained in scenarios where available training data is limited. We also demonstrate that the performance on the annotated image-caption pairs is maintained while improving on other non-annotated relevant items when employing the full training set. The code for our new metric can be found at github. com/furkanbiten/ncsmetric and the model implementation at github. com/andrespmd/semanticadaptive_margin.

Abstract: Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) refers to the task of answering questions from document images. Existing work on DocVQA only considers single-page documents. However, in real scenarios documents are mostly composed of multiple pages that should be processed altogether. In this work we extend DocVQA to the multi-page scenario. For that, we first create a new dataset, MP-DocVQA, where questions are posed over multi-page documents instead of single pages. Second, we propose a new hierarchical method, Hi-VT5, based on the T5 architecture, that overcomes the limitations of current methods to process long multi-page documents. The proposed method is based on a hierarchical transformer architecture where the encoder summarizes the most relevant information of every page and then, the decoder takes this summarized information to generate the final answer. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that our method is able, in a single stage, to answer the questions and provide the page that contains the relevant information to find the answer, which can be used as a kind of explainability measure.

Abstract: Tabular structures in business documents offer a complementary dimension to the raw textual data. For instance, there is information about the relationships among pieces of information. Nowadays, digital mailroom applications have become a key service for workflow automation. Therefore, the detection and interpretation of tables is crucial. With the recent advances in information extraction, table detection and recognition has gained interest in document image analysis, in particular, with the absence of rule lines and unknown information about rows and columns. However, business documents usually contain sensitive contents limiting the amount of public benchmarking datasets. In this paper, we propose a graph-based approach for detecting tables in document images which do not require the raw content of the document. Hence, the sensitive content can be previously removed and, instead of using the raw image or textual content, we propose a purely structural approach to keep sensitive data anonymous. Our framework uses graph neural networks (GNNs) to describe the local repetitive structures that constitute a table. In particular, our main application domain are business documents. We have carefully validated our approach in two invoice datasets and a modern document benchmark. Our experiments demonstrate that tables can be detected by purely structural approaches.

Abstract: During the last decades, the performance of optical music recognition has been increasingly improving. However, and despite the 2-dimensional nature of music notation (e.g. notes have rhythm and pitch), most works treat musical scores as a sequence of symbols in one dimension, which make their recognition still a challenge. Thus, in this work we explore the use of graph neural networks for musical score recognition. First, because graphs are suited for n-dimensional representations, and second, because the combination of graphs with deep learning has shown a great performance in similar applications. Our methodology consists of: First, we will detect each isolated/atomic symbols (those that can not be decomposed in more graphical primitives) and the primitives that form a musical symbol. Then, we will build the graph taking as root node the notehead and as leaves those primitives or symbols that modify the note’s rhythm (stem, beam, flag) or pitch (flat, sharp, natural). Finally, the graph is translated into a human-readable character sequence for a final transcription and evaluation. Our method has been tested on more than five thousand measures, showing promising results.

Abstract: In this paper we dene a bidimensional extension of Stochastic Context-Free Grammars for structure detection and segmentation of images of documents.
Two sets of text classication features are used to perform an initial classication of each zone of the page. Then, the document segmentation is obtained as the most likely hypothesis according to a stochastic grammar. We used a dataset of historical marriage license books to validate this approach. We also tested several inference algorithms for Probabilistic Graphical Models
and the results showed that the proposed grammatical model outperformed
the other methods. Furthermore, grammars also provide the document structure
along with its segmentation.

Abstract: Mobile document image acquisition is a new trend raising serious issues in business document processing workflows. Such digitization procedure is unreliable, and integrates many distortions which must be detected as soon as possible, on the mobile, to avoid paying data transmission fees, and losing information due to the inability to re-capture later a document with temporary availability. In this context, out-of-focus blur is major issue: users have no direct control over it, and it seriously degrades OCR recognition. In this paper, we concentrate on the estimation of focus quality, to ensure a sufficient legibility of a document image for OCR processing. We propose two contributions to improve OCR accuracy prediction for mobile-captured document images. First, we present 24 focus measures, never tested on document images, which are fast to compute and require no training. Second, we show that a combination of those measures enables state-of-the art performance regarding the correlation with OCR accuracy. The resulting approach is fast, robust, and easy to implement in a mobile device. Experiments are performed on a public dataset, and precise details about image processing are given.