Abstract: Nowadays, there are still many handwritten historical documents in archives waiting to be transcribed and indexed. Since manual transcription is tedious and time consuming, the automatic transcription seems the path to follow. However, the performance of current handwriting recognition techniques is not perfect, so a manual validation is mandatory. Crowdsourcing is a good strategy for manual validation, however it is a tedious task. In this paper we analyze experiences based in gamification
in order to propose and design a gamesourcing framework that increases the interest of users. Then, we describe and analyze our experience when validating the automatic transcription using the gamesourcing application. Moreover, thanks to the combination of clustering and handwriting recognition techniques, we can speed up the validation while maintaining the performance.

Abstract: arXiv:2007.12562
Most of the saliency methods are evaluated on their ability to generate saliency maps, and not on their functionality in a complete vision pipeline, like for instance, image classification. In the current paper, we propose an approach which does not require explicit saliency maps to improve image classification, but they are learned implicitely, during the training of an end-to-end image classification task. We show that our approach obtains similar results as the case when the saliency maps are provided explicitely. Combining RGB data with saliency maps represents a significant advantage for object recognition, especially for the case when training data is limited. We validate our method on several datasets for fine-grained classification tasks (Flowers, Birds and Cars). In addition, we show that our saliency estimation method, which is trained without any saliency groundtruth data, obtains competitive results on real image saliency benchmark (Toronto), and outperforms deep saliency models with synthetic images (SID4VAM).

Abstract: This paper presents a complete pipeline to perform deep learning-based instance segmentation of different types of grains (e.g., corn, sunflower, soybeans, lentils, chickpeas, mote, and beans). The proposed approach consists of using synthesized image datasets for the training process, which are easily generated according to the category of the instance to be segmented. The synthesized imaging process allows generating a large set of well-annotated grain samples with high variability—as large and high as the user requires. Instance segmentation is performed through a popular deep learning based approach, the Mask R-CNN architecture, but any learning-based instance segmentation approach can be considered. Results obtained by the proposed pipeline show that the strategy of using synthesized image datasets for training instance segmentation helps to avoid the time-consuming image annotation stage, as well as to achieve higher intersection over union and average precision performances. Results obtained with different varieties of grains are shown, as well as comparisons with manually annotated images, showing both the simplicity of the process and the improvements in the performance.

Abstract: Error-correcting output codes (ECOC) represents a powerful framework to deal with multiclass classification problems based on combining binary classifiers. The key factor affecting the performance of ECOC methods is the independence of binary classifiers, without which the ECOC method would be ineffective. In spite of its ability on classification of problems with relatively large number of classes, it has been applied in few real world problems. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of the ECOC approach on two image vision problems: logo recognition and shape classification using Decision Tree and AdaBoost as the base learners. The results show that the ECOC method can be used to improve the classification performance in comparison with the classical multiclass approaches.

Abstract: A method for text block detection is introduced for old handwritten documents. The proposed method takes advantage of sequential book structure, taking into account layout information from pages previously transcribed. This glance at the past is used to predict the position of text blocks in the current page with the help of conventional layout analysis methods. The method is integrated into the GIDOC prototype: a first attempt to provide integrated support for interactive-predictive page layout analysis, text line detection and handwritten text transcription. Results are given in a transcription task on a 764-page Spanish manuscript from 1891.

Abstract: We analyze the feasibility of a cheap eye-tracker where the hardware consists of a single webcam and a Raspberry Pi device. Our aim is to discover the limits of such a system and to see whether it provides an acceptable performance. We base our work on the open source Opengazer (Zielinski, 2013) and we propose several improvements to create a robust, real-time system. After assessing the accuracy of our eye-tracker in elaborated experiments involving 18 subjects under 4 different system setups, we developed a simple game to see how it performs in practice and we also installed it on a Raspberry Pi to create a portable stand-alone eye-tracker which achieves 1.62° horizontal accuracy with 3 fps refresh rate for a building cost of 70 Euros.

Abstract: Deep Neural Networks trained on large datasets can be easily transferred to new domains with far fewer labeled examples by a process called fine-tuning. This has the advantage that representations learned in the large source domain can be exploited on smaller target domains. However, networks designed to be optimal for the source task are often prohibitively large for the target task. In this work we address the compression of networks after domain transfer.
We focus on compression algorithms based on low-rank matrix decomposition. Existing methods base compression solely on learned network weights and ignore the statistics of network activations. We show that domain transfer leads to large shifts in network activations and that it is desirable to take this into account when compressing.
We demonstrate that considering activation statistics when compressing weights leads to a rank-constrained regression problem with a closed-form solution. Because our method takes into account the target domain, it can more optimally
remove the redundancy in the weights. Experiments show that our Domain Adaptive Low Rank (DALR) method significantly outperforms existing low-rank compression techniques. With our approach, the fc6 layer of VGG19 can be compressed more than 4x more than using truncated SVD alone – with only a minor or no loss in accuracy. When applied to domain-transferred networks it allows for compression down to only 5-20% of the original number of parameters with only a minor drop in performance.