Ciprian Corneanu, Meysam Madadi, Sergio Escalera, & Aleix M. Martinez. (2019). What does it mean to learn in deep networks? And, how does one detect adversarial attacks? In 32nd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 4752–4761).
Abstract: The flexibility and high-accuracy of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has transformed computer vision. But, the fact that we do not know when a specific DNN will work and when it will fail has resulted in a lack of trust. A clear example is self-driving cars; people are uncomfortable sitting in a car driven by algorithms that may fail under some unknown, unpredictable conditions. Interpretability and explainability approaches attempt to address this by uncovering what a DNN models, i.e., what each node (cell) in the network represents and what images are most likely to activate it. This can be used to generate, for example, adversarial attacks. But these approaches do not generally allow us to determine where a DNN will succeed or fail and why. i.e., does this learned representation generalize to unseen samples? Here, we derive a novel approach to define what it means to learn in deep networks, and how to use this knowledge to detect adversarial attacks. We show how this defines the ability of a network to generalize to unseen testing samples and, most importantly, why this is the case.
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Swathikiran Sudhakaran, Sergio Escalera, & Oswald Lanz. (2019). LSTA: Long Short-Term Attention for Egocentric Action Recognition. In 32nd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 9946–9955).
Abstract: Egocentric activity recognition is one of the most challenging tasks in video analysis. It requires a fine-grained discrimination of small objects and their manipulation. While some methods base on strong supervision and attention mechanisms, they are either annotation consuming or do not take spatio-temporal patterns into account. In this paper we propose LSTA as a mechanism to focus on features from spatial relevant parts while attention is being tracked smoothly across the video sequence. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LSTA on egocentric activity recognition with an end-to-end trainable two-stream architecture, achieving state-of-the-art performance on four standard benchmarks.
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Andres Mafla, Sounak Dey, Ali Furkan Biten, Lluis Gomez, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2020). Fine-grained Image Classification and Retrieval by Combining Visual and Locally Pooled Textual Features. In IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision.
Abstract: Text contained in an image carries high-level semantics that can be exploited to achieve richer image understanding. In particular, the mere presence of text provides strong guiding content that should be employed to tackle a diversity of computer vision tasks such as image retrieval, fine-grained classification, and visual question answering. In this paper, we address the problem of fine-grained classification and image retrieval by leveraging textual information along with visual cues to comprehend the existing intrinsic relation between the two modalities. The novelty of the proposed model consists of the usage of a PHOC descriptor to construct a bag of textual words along with a Fisher Vector Encoding that captures the morphology of text. This approach provides a stronger multimodal representation for this task and as our experiments demonstrate, it achieves state-of-the-art results on two different tasks, fine-grained classification and image retrieval.
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Rui Zhang, Yongsheng Zhou, Qianyi Jiang, Qi Song, Nan Li, Kai Zhou, et al. (2019). ICDAR 2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Reading Chinese Text on Signboard. In 15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 1577–1581).
Abstract: Chinese scene text reading is one of the most challenging problems in computer vision and has attracted great interest. Different from English text, Chinese has more than 6000 commonly used characters and Chinesecharacters can be arranged in various layouts with numerous fonts. The Chinese signboards in street view are a good choice for Chinese scene text images since they have different backgrounds, fonts and layouts. We organized a competition called ICDAR2019-ReCTS, which mainly focuses on reading Chinese text on signboard. This report presents the final results of the competition. A large-scale dataset of 25,000 annotated signboard images, in which all the text lines and characters are annotated with locations and transcriptions, were released. Four tasks, namely character recognition, text line recognition, text line detection and end-to-end recognition were set up. Besides, considering the Chinese text ambiguity issue, we proposed a multi ground truth (multi-GT) evaluation method to make evaluation fairer. The competition started on March 1, 2019 and ended on April 30, 2019. 262 submissions from 46 teams are received. Most of the participants come from universities, research institutes, and tech companies in China. There are also some participants from the United States, Australia, Singapore, and Korea. 21 teams submit results for Task 1, 23 teams submit results for Task 2, 24 teams submit results for Task 3, and 13 teams submit results for Task 4.
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Helena Muñoz, Fernando Vilariño, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2019). Eye-Movements During Information Extraction from Administrative Documents. In International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition Workshops (pp. 6–9).
Abstract: A key aspect of digital mailroom processes is the extraction of relevant information from administrative documents. More often than not, the extraction process cannot be fully automated, and there is instead an important amount of manual intervention. In this work we study the human process of information extraction from invoice document images. We explore whether the gaze of human annotators during an manual information extraction process could be exploited towards reducing the manual effort and automating the process. To this end, we perform an eye-tracking experiment replicating real-life interfaces for information extraction. Through this pilot study we demonstrate that relevant areas in the document can be identified reliably through automatic fixation classification, and the obtained models generalize well to new subjects. Our findings indicate that it is in principle possible to integrate the human in the document image analysis loop, making use of the scanpath to automate the extraction process or verify extracted information.
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Mohammed Al Rawi, Ernest Valveny, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2019). Can One Deep Learning Model Learn Script-Independent Multilingual Word-Spotting? In 15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 260–267).
Abstract: Word spotting has gained increased attention lately as it can be used to extract textual information from handwritten documents and scene-text images. Current word spotting approaches are designed to work on a single language and/or script. Building intelligent models that learn script-independent multilingual word-spotting is challenging due to the large variability of multilingual alphabets and symbols. We used ResNet-152 and the Pyramidal Histogram of Characters (PHOC) embedding to build a one-model script-independent multilingual word-spotting and we tested it on Latin, Arabic, and Bangla (Indian) languages. The one-model we propose performs on par with the multi-model language-specific word-spotting system, and thus, reduces the number of models needed for each script and/or language.
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Zheng Huang, Kai Chen, Jianhua He, Xiang Bai, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Shijian Lu, et al. (2019). ICDAR2019 Competition on Scanned Receipt OCR and Information Extraction. In 15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 1516–1520).
Abstract: The ICDAR 2019 Challenge on “Scanned receipts OCR and key information extraction” (SROIE) covers important aspects related to the automated analysis of scanned receipts. The SROIE tasks play a key role in many document analysis systems and hold significant commercial potential. Although a lot of work has been published over the years on administrative document analysis, the community has advanced relatively slowly, as most datasets have been kept private. One of the key contributions of SROIE to the document analysis community is to offer a first, standardized dataset of 1000 whole scanned receipt images and annotations, as well as an evaluation procedure for such tasks. The Challenge is structured around three tasks, namely Scanned Receipt Text Localization (Task 1), Scanned Receipt OCR (Task 2) and Key Information Extraction from Scanned Receipts (Task 3). The competition opened on 10th February, 2019 and closed on 5th May, 2019. We received 29, 24 and 18 valid submissions received for the three competition tasks, respectively. This report presents the competition datasets, define the tasks and the evaluation protocols, offer detailed submission statistics, as well as an analysis of the submitted performance. While the tasks of text localization and recognition seem to be relatively easy to tackle, it is interesting to observe the variety of ideas and approaches proposed for the information extraction task. According to the submissions' performance we believe there is still margin for improving information extraction performance, although the current dataset would have to grow substantially in following editions. Given the success of the SROIE competition evidenced by the wide interest generated and the healthy number of submissions from academic, research institutes and industry over different countries, we consider that the SROIE competition can evolve into a useful resource for the community, drawing further attention and promoting research and development efforts in this field.
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Yipeng Sun, Zihan Ni, Chee-Kheng Chng, Yuliang Liu, Canjie Luo, Chun Chet Ng, et al. (2019). ICDAR 2019 Competition on Large-Scale Street View Text with Partial Labeling – RRC-LSVT. In 15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 1557–1562).
Abstract: Robust text reading from street view images provides valuable information for various applications. Performance improvement of existing methods in such a challenging scenario heavily relies on the amount of fully annotated training data, which is costly and in-efficient to obtain. To scale up the amount of training data while keeping the labeling procedure cost-effective, this competition introduces a new challenge on Large-scale Street View Text with Partial Labeling (LSVT), providing 50, 000 and 400, 000 images in full and weak annotations, respectively. This competition aims to explore the abilities of state-of-the-art methods to detect and recognize text instances from large-scale street view images, closing the gap between research benchmarks and real applications. During the competition period, a total of 41 teams participated in the two proposed tasks with 132 valid submissions, ie, text detection and end-to-end text spotting. This paper includes dataset descriptions, task definitions, evaluation protocols and results summaries of the ICDAR 2019-LSVT challenge.
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Chee-Kheng Chng, Yuliang Liu, Yipeng Sun, Chun Chet Ng, Canjie Luo, Zihan Ni, et al. (2019). ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Arbitrary-Shaped Text – RRC-ArT. In 15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 1571–1576).
Abstract: This paper reports the ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Arbitrary-Shaped Text – RRC-ArT that consists of three major challenges: i) scene text detection, ii) scene text recognition, and iii) scene text spotting. A total of 78 submissions from 46 unique teams/individuals were received for this competition. The top performing score of each challenge is as follows: i) T1 – 82.65%, ii) T2.1 – 74.3%, iii) T2.2 – 85.32%, iv) T3.1 – 53.86%, and v) T3.2 – 54.91%. Apart from the results, this paper also details the ArT dataset, tasks description, evaluation metrics and participants' methods. The dataset, the evaluation kit as well as the results are publicly available at the challenge website.
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Nibal Nayef, Yash Patel, Michal Busta, Pinaki Nath Chowdhury, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Wafa Khlif, et al. (2019). ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Multi-lingual Scene Text Detection and Recognition — RRC-MLT-2019. In 15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 1582–1587).
Abstract: With the growing cosmopolitan culture of modern cities, the need of robust Multi-Lingual scene Text (MLT) detection and recognition systems has never been more immense. With the goal to systematically benchmark and push the state-of-the-art forward, the proposed competition builds on top of the RRC-MLT-2017 with an additional end-to-end task, an additional language in the real images dataset, a large scale multi-lingual synthetic dataset to assist the training, and a baseline End-to-End recognition method. The real dataset consists of 20,000 images containing text from 10 languages. The challenge has 4 tasks covering various aspects of multi-lingual scene text: (a) text detection, (b) cropped word script classification, (c) joint text detection and script classification and (d) end-to-end detection and recognition. In total, the competition received 60 submissions from the research and industrial communities. This paper presents the dataset, the tasks and the findings of the presented RRC-MLT-2019 challenge.
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Arnau Baro, Alicia Fornes, & Carles Badal. (2020). Handwritten Historical Music Recognition by Sequence-to-Sequence with Attention Mechanism. In 17th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition.
Abstract: Despite decades of research in Optical Music Recognition (OMR), the recognition of old handwritten music scores remains a challenge because of the variabilities in the handwriting styles, paper degradation, lack of standard notation, etc. Therefore, the research in OMR systems adapted to the particularities of old manuscripts is crucial to accelerate the conversion of music scores existing in archives into digital libraries, fostering the dissemination and preservation of our music heritage. In this paper we explore the adaptation of sequence-to-sequence models with attention mechanism (used in translation and handwritten text recognition) and the generation of specific synthetic data for recognizing old music scores. The experimental validation demonstrates that our approach is promising, especially when compared with long short-term memory neural networks.
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Jialuo Chen, M.A.Souibgui, Alicia Fornes, & Beata Megyesi. (2020). A Web-based Interactive Transcription Tool for Encrypted Manuscripts. In 3rd International Conference on Historical Cryptology (pp. 52–59).
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.
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Veronica Romero, Emilio Granell, Alicia Fornes, Enrique Vidal, & Joan Andreu Sanchez. (2019). Information Extraction in Handwritten Marriage Licenses Books. In 5th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (pp. 66–71).
Abstract: Handwritten marriage licenses books are characterized by a simple structure of the text in the records with an evolutionary vocabulary, mainly composed of proper names that change along the time. This distinct vocabulary makes automatic transcription and semantic information extraction difficult tasks. Previous works have shown that the use of category-based language models and a Grammatical Inference technique known as MGGI can improve the accuracy of these
tasks. However, the application of the MGGI algorithm requires an a priori knowledge to label the words of the training strings, that is not always easy to obtain. In this paper we study how to automatically obtain the information required by the MGGI algorithm using a technique based on Confusion Networks. Using the resulting language model, full handwritten text recognition and information extraction experiments have been carried out with results supporting the proposed approach.
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Manuel Carbonell, Joan Mas, Mauricio Villegas, Alicia Fornes, & Josep Llados. (2019). End-to-End Handwritten Text Detection and Transcription in Full Pages. In 2nd International Workshop on Machine Learning (Vol. 5, pp. 29–34).
Abstract: When transcribing handwritten document images, inaccuracies in the text segmentation step often cause errors in the subsequent transcription step. For this reason, some recent methods propose to perform the recognition at paragraph level. But still, errors in the segmentation of paragraphs can affect
the transcription performance. In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework to transcribe full pages. The joint text detection and transcription allows to remove the layout analysis requirement at test time. The experimental results show that our approach can achieve comparable results to models that assume
segmented paragraphs, and suggest that joining the two tasks brings an improvement over doing the two tasks separately.
Keywords: Handwritten Text Recognition; Layout Analysis; Text segmentation; Deep Neural Networks; Multi-task learning
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Asma Bensalah, Pau Riba, Alicia Fornes, & Josep Llados. (2019). Shoot less and Sketch more: An Efficient Sketch Classification via Joining Graph Neural Networks and Few-shot Learning. In 13th IAPR International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (pp. 80–85).
Abstract: With the emergence of the touchpad devices and drawing tablets, a new era of sketching started afresh. However, the recognition of sketches is still a tough task due to the variability of the drawing styles. Moreover, in some application scenarios there is few labelled data available for training,
which imposes a limitation for deep learning architectures. In addition, in many cases there is a need to generate models able to adapt to new classes. In order to cope with these limitations, we propose a method based on few-shot learning and graph neural networks for classifying sketches aiming for an efficient neural model. We test our approach with several databases of
sketches, showing promising results.
Keywords: Sketch classification; Convolutional Neural Network; Graph Neural Network; Few-shot learning
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