Abstract: This paper presents the results of the first Challenge of ICDAR 2011 Robust Reading Competition. Challenge 1 is focused on the extraction of text from born-digital images, specifically from images found in Web pages and emails. The challenge was organized in terms of three tasks that look at different stages of the process: text localization, text segmentation and word recognition. In this paper we present the results of the challenge for all three tasks, and make an open call for continuous participation outside the context of ICDAR 2011.

Abstract: Graph representation of graphical documents often suffers from noise viz. spurious nodes and spurios edges of graph and their discontinuity etc. In general these errors occur during the low-level image processing viz. binarization, skeletonization, vectorization etc. Hierarchical graph representation is a nice and efficient way to solve this kind of problem by hierarchically merging node-node and node-edge depending on the distance.
But the creation of hierarchical graph representing the graphical information often uses hard thresholds on the distance to create the hierarchical nodes (next state) of the lower nodes (or states) of a graph. As a result the representation often loses useful information. This paper introduces plausibilities to the nodes of hierarchical graph as a function of distance and proposes a modified algorithm for matching subgraphs of the hierarchical
graphs. The plausibility-annotated nodes help to improve the performance of the matching algorithm on two hierarchical structures. To show the potential of this approach, we conduct an experiment with the SESYD dataset.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a complete framework that automatically provides fluid-dynamic and plaque analysis from IVUS and Angiographic sequences. Such framework is used to analyze, in three coronary arteries, the relation between wall shear stress with type and amount of plaque. Preliminary qualitative results show an inverse relation between the wall shear stress and the plaque burden, which is confirmed by the fact that the plaque growth is higher on the wall having concave curvature. Regarding the plaque type it was observed that regions having low shear stress are predominantly fibro-lipidic while the heavy calcifications are in general located in areas of the vessel having high WSS.

Abstract: This paper deals with a subgraph matching problem in Region Adjacency Graph (RAG) applied to symbol spotting in graphical documents. RAG is a very important, efficient and natural way of representing graphical information with a graph but this is limited to cases where the information is well defined with perfectly delineated regions. What if the information we are interested in is not confined within well defined regions? This paper addresses this particular problem and solves it by defining near convex grouping of oriented line segments which results in near convex regions. Pure convexity imposes hard constraints and can not handle all the cases efficiently. Hence to solve this problem we have defined a new type of convexity of regions, which allows convex regions to have concavity to some extend. We call this kind of regions Near Convex Regions (NCRs). These NCRs are then used to create the Near Convex Region Adjacency Graph (NCRAG) and with this representation we have formulated the problem of symbol spotting in graphical documents as a subgraph matching problem. For subgraph matching we have used the Approximate Edit Distance Algorithm (AEDA) on the neighborhood string, which starts working after finding a key node in the input or target graph and iteratively identifies similar nodes of the query graph in the neighborhood of the key node. The experiments are performed on artificial, real and distorted datasets.

Abstract: Recent progress in the field of human action recognition points towards the use of Spatio-Temporal Interest Points (STIPs) for local descriptor-based recognition strategies. In this paper we present a new approach for STIP detection by applying surround suppression combined with local and temporal constraints. Our method is significantly different from existing STIP detectors and improves the performance by detecting more repeatable, stable and distinctive STIPs for human actors, while suppressing unwanted background STIPs. For action representation we use a bag-of-visual words (BoV) model of local N-jet features to build a vocabulary of visual-words. To this end, we introduce a novel vocabulary building strategy by combining spatial pyramid and vocabulary compression techniques, resulting in improved performance and efficiency. Action class specific Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers are trained for categorization of human actions. A comprehensive set of experiments on existing benchmark datasets, and more challenging datasets of complex scenes, validate our approach and show state-of-the-art performance.

Abstract: Architectural floorplans exhibit a large variability in notation. Therefore, segmenting and identifying the elements of any kind of plan becomes a challenging task for approaches based on grouping structural primitives obtained by vectorization. Recently, a patch-based segmentation method working at pixel level and relying on the construction of a visual vocabulary has been proposed showing its adaptability to different notations by automatically learning the visual appearance of the elements in each different notation. In this paper we describe an evolution of this new approach in two directions: firstly we evaluate different features to obtain the description of every patch. Secondly, we train an SVM classifier to obtain the category of every patch instead of constructing a visual vocabulary. These modifications of the method have been tested for wall detection on two datasets of architectural floorplans with different notations and compared with the results obtained with the original approach.

Abstract: The automatic processing of handwritten historical documents is considered a hard problem in pattern recognition. In addition to the challenges given by modern handwritten data, a lack of training data as well as effects caused by the degradation of documents can be observed. In this scenario, keyword spotting arises to be a viable solution to make documents amenable for searching and browsing. For this task we propose the adaptation of shape descriptors used in symbol recognition. By treating each word image as a shape, it can be represented using the Blurred Shape Model and the De-formable Blurred Shape Model. Experiments on the George Washington database demonstrate that this approach is able to outperform the commonly used Dynamic Time Warping approach.