Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning and Document Image Analysis and Recognition have significantly eased the creation of digital libraries and the transcription of historical documents. However, for documents in rare scripts with few labelled training data available, current Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) systems are too constraint. Moreover, research on HTR often focuses on technical aspects only, and rarely puts emphasis on implementing software tools for scholars in Humanities. In this article, we describe, compare and analyse different transcription methods for rare scripts. We evaluate their performance in a real use case of a medieval manuscript written in the runic script (Codex Runicus) and discuss advantages and disadvantages of each method from the user perspective. From this exhaustive analysis and comparison with a fully manual transcription, we raise conclusions and provide recommendations to scholars interested in using automatic transcription tools.

Abstract: Despite recent advances in automatic text recognition, the performance remains moderate when it comes to historical manuscripts. This is mainly because of the scarcity of available labelled data to train the data-hungry Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) models. The Keyword Spotting System (KWS) provides a valid alternative to HTR due to the reduction in error rate, but it is usually limited to a closed reference vocabulary. In this paper, we propose a few-shot learning paradigm for spotting sequences of a few characters (N-gram) that requires a small amount of labelled training data. We exhibit that recognition of important n-grams could reduce the system’s dependency on vocabulary. In this case, an out-of-vocabulary (OOV) word in an input handwritten line image could be a sequence of n-grams that belong to the lexicon. An extensive experimental evaluation of our proposed multi-representation approach was carried out on a subset of Bentham’s historical manuscript collections to obtain some really promising results in this direction.

Abstract: The Barcelona Historical Marriage Database (BHMD) gathers records of the more than 600,000 marriages celebrated in the Diocese of Barcelona and their taxation registered in Barcelona Cathedral's so-called Marriage Licenses Books for the long period 1451–1905 and the BALL Demographic Database brings together the individual information recorded in the population registers, censuses and fiscal censuses of the main municipalities of the county of Baix Llobregat (Barcelona). In this ongoing collection 263,786 individual observations have been assembled, dating from the period between 1828 and 1965 by December 2020. The two databases started as part of different interdisciplinary research projects at the crossroads of Historical Demography and Computer Vision. Their construction uses artificial intelligence and computer vision methods as Handwriting Recognition to reduce the time of execution. However, its current state still requires some human intervention which explains the implemented crowdsourcing and game sourcing experiences. Moreover, knowledge graph techniques have allowed the application of advanced record linkage to link the same individuals and families across time and space. Moreover, we will discuss the main research lines using both databases developed so far in historical demography.

Abstract: This project explores the feasibility of remote patient monitoring based on the analysis of 3D movements captured with smartwatches. We base our analysis on the Kinematic Theory of Rapid Human Movement. We have validated our research in a real case scenario for stroke rehabilitation at the Guttmann Institute (https://www.guttmann.com/en/) (neurorehabilitation hospital), showing promising results. Our work could have a great impact in remote healthcare applications, improving the medical efficiency and reducing the healthcare costs. Future steps include more clinical validation, developing multi-modal analysis architectures (analysing data from sensors, images, audio, etc.), and exploring the application of our technology to monitor other neurodegenerative diseases.

Abstract: Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a few-shot learning-based handwriting recognition approach that significantly reduces the human annotation process, by requiring only a few images of each alphabet symbols. The method consists of detecting all the symbols of a given alphabet in a textline image and decoding the obtained similarity scores to the final sequence of transcribed symbols. Our model is first pretrained on synthetic line images generated from an alphabet, which could differ from the alphabet of the target domain. A second training step is then applied to reduce the gap between the source and the target data. Since this retraining would require annotation of thousands of handwritten symbols together with their bounding boxes, we propose to avoid such human effort through an unsupervised progressive learning approach that automatically assigns pseudo-labels to the unlabeled data. The evaluation on different datasets shows that our model can lead to competitive results with a significant reduction in human effort. The code will be publicly available in the following repository: https://github.com/dali92002/HTRbyMatching

Abstract: Nowadays the paradigm of link discovery problems has shown significant improvements on Knowledge Graphs. However, method performances are harmed by the unbalanced nature of this classification problem, since many methods are easily biased to not find proper links. In this paper we present a discriminative neural variational auto-encoder model, called DNVAE from now on, in which we have introduced latent variables to serve as embedding vectors. As a result, the learnt generative model approximate better the underlying distribution and, at the same time, it better differentiate the type of relations in the knowledge graph. We have evaluated this approach on benchmark knowledge graph and Census records. Results in this last data set are quite impressive since we reach the highest possible score in the evaluation metrics. However, further experiments are still needed to deeper evaluate the performance of the method in more challenging tasks.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel method for date estimation of historical photographs from archival sources. The main contribution is to formulate the date estimation as a retrieval task, where given a query, the retrieved images are ranked in terms of the estimated date similarity. The closer are their embedded representations the closer are their dates. Contrary to the traditional models that design a neural network that learns a classifier or a regressor, we propose a learning objective based on the nDCG ranking metric. We have experimentally evaluated the performance of the method in two different tasks: date estimation and date-sensitive image retrieval, using the DEW public database, overcoming the baseline methods.

Abstract: Despite significant progress on current state-of-the-art image generation models, synthesis of document images containing multiple and complex object layouts is a challenging task. This paper presents a novel approach, called DocSynth, to automatically synthesize document images based on a given layout. In this work, given a spatial layout (bounding boxes with object categories) as a reference by the user, our proposed DocSynth model learns to generate a set of realistic document images consistent with the defined layout. Also, this framework has been adapted to this work as a superior baseline model for creating synthetic document image datasets for augmenting real data during training for document layout analysis tasks. Different sets of learning objectives have been also used to improve the model performance. Quantitatively, we also compare the generated results of our model with real data using standard evaluation metrics. The results highlight that our model can successfully generate realistic and diverse document images with multiple objects. We also present a comprehensive qualitative analysis summary of the different scopes of synthetic image generation tasks. Lastly, to our knowledge this is the first work of its kind.