Abstract: Gesture Recognition (GR) is a challenging research area in computer vision. To tackle the annotation bottleneck in GR, we formulate the problem of Zero-Shot Gesture Recognition (ZS-GR) and propose a two-stream model from two input modalities: RGB and Depth videos. To benefit from the vision Transformer capabilities, we use two vision Transformer models, for human detection and visual features representation. We configure a transformer encoder-decoder architecture, as a fast and accurate human detection model, to overcome the challenges of the current human detection models. Considering the human keypoints, the detected human body is segmented into nine parts. A spatio-temporal representation from human body is obtained using a vision Transformer and a LSTM network. A semantic space maps the visual features to the lingual embedding of the class labels via a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model. We evaluated the proposed model on five datasets, Montalbano II, MSR Daily Activity 3D, CAD-60, NTU-60, and isoGD obtaining state-of-the-art results compared to state-of-the-art ZS-GR models as well as the Zero-Shot Action Recognition (ZS-AR).

Abstract: XBadges is a research project based on the hypothesis that commercial video games (nonserious games) can train soft skills. We measure persistence, patial reasoning and risk taking before and after subjects paticipate in controlled game playing sessions.
In addition, we have developed an automatic facial expression recognition system capable of inferring their emotions while playing, allowing us to study the role of emotions in soft skills acquisition. We have used Flappy Bird, Pacman and Tetris for assessing changes in persistence, risk taking and spatial reasoning respectively.
Results show how playing Tetris significantly improves spatial reasoning and how playing Pacman significantly improves prudence in certain areas of behavior. As for emotions, they reveal that being concentrated helps to improve performance and skills acquisition. Frustration is also shown as a key element. With the results obtained we are able to glimpse multiple applications in areas which need soft skills development.

Abstract: The aim of writer identification is determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of writers. In this paper we present a system for writer identification in old handwritten music scores. Even though an important amount of compositions contains handwritten text in the music scores, the aim of our work is to use only music notation to determine the author. The steps of the system proposed are the following. First of all, the music sheet is preprocessed and normalized for obtaining a single binarized music line, without the staff lines. Afterwards, 100 features are extracted for every music line, which are subsequently used in a k-NN classifier that compares every feature vector with prototypes stored in a database. By applying feature selection and extraction methods on the original feature set, the performance is increased. The proposed method has been tested on a database of old music scores from the 17th to 19th centuries, achieving a recognition rate of about 95%.

Abstract: The analysis and recognition of historical document images has attracted growing interest in the last years. Mass digitization and document image understanding allows the preservation, access and indexation of this artistic, cultural and technical heritage. The analysis of handwritten documents is an outstanding subfield. The main interest is not only the transcription of the document to a standard format, but also, the identification of the author of a document from a set of writers (namely writer identification).
Writer identification in handwritten text documents is an active area of study, however, the identification of the writer of graphical documents is still a challenge. The main objective of this thesis is the identification of the writer in old music scores, as an example of graphic documents. Concerning old music scores, many historical archives contain a huge number of sheets of musical compositions without information about the composer, and the research on this field could be helpful for musicologists.
The writer identification framework proposed in this thesis combines three different writer identification approaches, which are the main scientific contributions. The first one is based on symbol recognition methods. For this purpose, two novel symbol recognition methods are proposed for coping with the typical distortions in hand-drawn symbols. The second approach preprocesses the music score for obtaining music lines, and extracts information about the slant, width of the writing, connected components, contours and fractals. Finally, the third approach extracts global information by generating texture images from the music scores and extracting textural features (such as Gabor filters and co-occurence matrices).
The high identification rates obtained in the experimental results demonstrate the suitability of the proposed ensemble architecture. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first contribution on writer identification from images containing graphical languages.

Abstract: In some Thai documents, a single text line of a printed document page may contain words of both Thai and Roman scripts. For the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of such a document page it is better to identify, at first, Thai and Roman script portions and then to use individual OCR systems of the respective scripts on these identified portions. In this article, an SVM-based method is proposed for identification of word-wise printed Roman and Thai scripts from a single line of a document page. Here, at first, the document is segmented into lines and then lines are segmented into character groups (words). In the proposed scheme, we identify the script of a character group combining different character features obtained from structural shape, profile behavior, component overlapping information, topological properties, and water reservoir concept, etc. Based on the experiment on 10,000 data (words) we obtained 99.62% script identification accuracy from the proposed scheme.

Abstract: In this paper we address the problem of unconstrained Word Spotting in scene images. We train a Fully Convolutional Network to produce heatmaps of all the character classes. Then, we employ the Text Proposals approach and, via a rectangle classifier, detect the most likely rectangle for each query word based on the character attribute maps. We evaluate the proposed method on ICDAR2015 and show that it is capable of identifying and recognizing query words in natural scene images.

Abstract: Text is the most common way of information sharing from ages. With recent development of personal images databases and handwritten historic manuscripts the demand for algorithms to make these databases accessible for browsing and indexing are in rise. Enabling search or understanding large collection of manuscripts or image databases needs fast and robust methods. Researchers have found different ways to represent cropped words for understanding and matching, which works well when words are already segmented. However there is no trivial way to extend these for non-segmented documents. In this thesis we explore different methods for text retrieval and recognition from unsegmented document and scene images. Two different ways of representation exist in literature, one uses a fixed length representation learned from cropped words and another a sequence of features of variable length. Throughout this thesis, we have studied both these representation for their suitability in segmentation free understanding of text. In the first part we are focused on segmentation free word spotting using a fixed length representation. We extended the use of the successful PHOC (Pyramidal Histogram of Character) representation to segmentation free retrieval. In the second part of the thesis, we explore sequence based features and finally, we propose a unified solution where the same framework can generate both kind of representations.