Abstract: Historical cryptology studies (original) encrypted manuscripts, often handwritten sources, produced in our history. These historical sources can be found in archives, often hidden without any indexing and therefore hard to locate. Once found they need to be digitized and turned into a machine-readable text format before they can be deciphered with computational methods. The focus of historical cryptology is not primarily the development of sophisticated algorithms for decipherment, but rather the entire process of analysis of the encrypted source from collection and digitization to transcription and decryption. The process also includes the interpretation and contextualization of the message set in its historical context. There are many challenges on the way, such as mistakes made by the scribe, errors made by the transcriber, damaged pages, handwriting styles that are difficult to interpret, historical languages from various time periods, and hidden underlying language of the message. Ciphertexts vary greatly in terms of their code system and symbol sets used with more or less distinguishable symbols. Ciphertexts can be embedded in clearly written text, or shorter or longer sequences of cleartext can be embedded in the ciphertext. The ciphers used mostly in historical times are substitutions (simple, homophonic, or polyphonic), with or without nomenclatures, encoded as digits or symbol sequences, with or without spaces. So the circumstances are different from those in modern cryptography which focuses on methods (algorithms) and their strengths and assumes that the algorithm is applied correctly. For both historical and modern cryptology, attack vectors outside the algorithm are applied like implementation flaws and side-channel attacks. In this chapter, we give an introduction to the field of historical cryptology and present an overview of how researchers today process historical encrypted sources.

Abstract: Abstract. In this paper we propose biometric descriptors inspired by shape signatures traditionally used in graphics recognition approaches. In particular several methods based on line shape descriptors used to iden- tify newborns from the biometric information of the ears are developed. The process steps are the following: image acquisition, ear segmentation, ear normalization, feature extraction and identification. Several shape signatures are defined from contour images. These are formulated in terms of zoning and contour crossings descriptors. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the used techniques.

Abstract: Presently, man-machine interface development is a widespread research activity. A system to understand hand drawn architectural drawings in a CAD environment is presented in this paper. To understand a document, we have to identify its building elements and their structural properties. An attributed graph structure is chosen as a symbolic representation of the input document and the patterns to recognize in it. An inexact subgraph isomorphism procedure using relaxation labeling techniques is performed. In this paper we focus on how to speed up the matching. There is a building element, the walls, characterized by a hatching pattern. Using a straight line Hough transform (SLHT)-based method, we recognize this pattern, characterized by parallel straight lines, and remove from the input graph the edges belonging to this pattern. The isomorphism is then applied to the remainder of the input graph. When all the building elements have been recognized, the document is redrawn, correcting the inaccurate strokes obtained from a hand-drawn input.

Abstract: In this chapter we describe a system for document retrieval and classification following the interactive-predictive framework. In particular, the system addresses two different scenarios of document analysis: document classification based on visual appearance and logo detection. These two classical problems of document analysis are formulated following the interactive-predictive model, taking the user interaction into account to make easier the process of annotating and labelling the documents. A system implementing this model in a real scenario is presented and analyzed. This system also takes advantage of active learning techniques to speed up the task of labelling the documents.

Abstract: A significative percentage of the human population suffer from impairments in their capacity to distinguish or even see colours. For them, everyday tasks like navigating through a train or metro network map becomes demanding. We present a novel technique for extracting colour information from everyday natural stimuli and presenting it to visually impaired users as pleasant, non-invasive sound. This technique was implemented inside a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) portable device. In this implementation, colour information is extracted from the input image and categorised according to how human observers segment the colour space. This information is subsequently converted into sound and sent to the user via speakers or headphones. In the original implementation, it is possible for the user to send its feedback to reconfigure the system, however several features such as these were not implemented because the current technology is limited.We are confident that the full implementation will be possible in the near future as PDA technology improves.

Abstract: In this paper we present an example of a video surveillance application that exploits Multimodal Interactive (MI) technologies. The main objective of the so-called VID-Hum prototype was to develop a cognitive artificial system for both the detection and description of a particular set of human behaviours arising from real-world events. The main procedure of the prototype described in this chapter entails: (i) adaptation, since the system adapts itself to the most common behaviours (qualitative data) inferred from tracking (quantitative data) thus being able to recognize abnormal behaviors; (ii) feedback, since an advanced interface based on Natural Language understanding allows end-users the communicationwith the prototype by means of conceptual sentences; and (iii) multimodality, since a virtual avatar has been designed to describe what is happening in the scene, based on those textual interpretations generated by the prototype. Thus, the MI methodology has provided an adequate framework for all these cooperating processes.

Abstract: The Baix Llobregat (BALL) Demographic Database is an ongoing database project containing individual census data from the Catalan region of Baix Llobregat (Spain) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The BALL Database is built within the project ‘NETWORKS: Technology and citizen innovation for building historical social networks to understand the demographic past’ directed by Alícia Fornés from the Center for Computer Vision and Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora from the Center for Demographic Studies, both at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, funded by the Recercaixa program (2017–2019).
Its webpage is http://dag.cvc.uab.es/xarxes/.The aim of the project is to develop technologies facilitating massive digitalization of demographic sources, and more specifically the padrones (local censuses), in order to reconstruct historical ‘social’ networks employing computer vision technology. Such virtual networks can be created thanks to the linkage of nominative records compiled in the local censuses across time and space. Thus, digitized versions of individual and family lifespans are established, and individuals and families can be located spatially.