Abstract: he objective of this work is to show the importance of a good line segmentation to obtain better results in the segmentation of words of historical documents. We have used the approach developed by Manmatha and Rothfeder [1] to segment words in old handwritten documents. In their work the lines of the documents are extracted using projections. In this work, we have developed an approach to segment lines more efficiently. The new line segmentation algorithm tackles with skewed, touching and noisy lines, so it is significantly improves word segmentation. Experiments using Spanish documents from the Marriages Database of the Barcelona Cathedral show that this approach reduces the error rate by more than 20%

Abstract: In this paper we propose an approach for word spotting in handwritten document images. We state the problem from a focused retrieval perspective, i.e. locating instances of a query word in a large scale dataset of digitized manuscripts. We combine two approaches, namely one based on word segmentation and another one segmentation-free. The first approach uses a hashing strategy to coarsely prune word images that are unlikely to be instances of the query word. This process is fast but has a low precision due to the errors introduced in the segmentation step. The regions containing candidate words are sent to the second process based on a state of the art technique from the visual object detection field. This discriminative model represents the appearance of the query word and computes a similarity score. In this way we propose a coarse-to-fine approach achieving a compromise between efficiency and accuracy. The validation of the model is shown using a collection of old handwritten manuscripts. We appreciate a substantial improvement in terms of precision regarding the previous proposed method with a low computational cost increase.

Abstract: We describe an architecture for a multi-camera, multi-resolution surveillance system. The aim is to support a set of distributed static and pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras and visual tracking algorithms, together with a central supervisor unit. Each camera (and possibly pan-tilt device) has a dedicated process and processor. Asynchronous interprocess communications and archiving of data are achieved in a simple and effective way via a central repository, implemented using an SQL database. Visual tracking data from static views are stored dynamically into tables in the database via client calls to the SQL server. A supervisor process running on the SQL server determines if active zoom cameras should be dispatched to observe a particular target, and this message is effected via writing demands into another database table. We show results from a real implementation of the system comprising one static camera overviewing the environment under consideration and a PTZ camera operating under closed-loop velocity control, which uses a fast and robust level-set-based region tracker. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and its feasibility to multi-camera systems for intelligent surveillance.

Abstract: Best Poster Award.
Reducing the amount of keypoints used to index an image is particularly interesting to control processing time and memory usage in real-time document image matching applications, like augmented documents or smartphone applications. This paper benchmarks two keypoint selection methods on a task consisting of reducing keypoint sets extracted from document images, while preserving detection and segmentation accuracy. We first study the different forms of keypoint filtering, and we introduce the use of the CORE selection method on
keypoints extracted from document images. Then, we extend a previously published benchmark by including evaluations of the new method, by adding the SURF-BRISK detection/description scheme, and by reporting processing speeds. Evaluations are conducted on the publicly available dataset of ICDAR2015 SmartDOC challenge 1. Finally, we prove that reducing the original keypoint set is always feasible and can be beneficial
not only to processing speed but also to accuracy.

Abstract: As mobile document acquisition using smartphones is getting more and more common, along with the continuous improvement of mobile devices (both in terms of computing power and image quality), we can wonder to which extent mobile phones can replace desktop scanners. Modern applications can cope with perspective distortion and normalize the contrast of a document page captured with a smartphone, and in some cases like bottle labels or posters, smartphones even have the advantage of allowing the acquisition of non-flat or large documents. However, several cases remain hard to handle, such as reflective documents (identity cards, badges, glossy magazine cover, etc.) or large documents for which some regions require an important amount of detail. This paper introduces the SmartDoc 2017 benchmark (named “SmartDoc Video Capture”), which aims at
assessing whether capturing documents using the video mode of a smartphone could solve those issues. The task under evaluation is both a stitching and a reconstruction problem, as the user can move the device over different parts of the document to capture details or try to erase highlights. The material released consists of a dataset, an evaluation method and the associated tool, a sample method, and the tools required to extend the dataset. All the components are released publicly under very permissive licenses, and we particularly cared about maximizing the ease of
understanding, usage and improvement.

Abstract: Optical Music Recognition is the task of transcribing a music score into a machine readable format. Many music scores are written in a single staff, and therefore, they could be treated as a sequence. Therefore, this work explores the use of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Networks for reading the music score sequentially, where the LSTM helps in keeping the context. For training, we have used a synthetic dataset of more than 40000 images, labeled at primitive level

Abstract: Results of ICDAR 2017 Robust Reading Challenge on Omnidirectional Video are presented. This competition uses Downtown Osaka Scene Text (DOST) Dataset that was captured in Osaka, Japan with an omnidirectional camera. Hence, it consists of sequential images (videos) of different view angles. Regarding the sequential images as videos (video mode), two tasks of localisation and end-to-end recognition are prepared. Regarding them as a set of still images (still image mode), three tasks of localisation, cropped word recognition and end-to-end recognition are prepared. As the dataset has been captured in Japan, the dataset contains Japanese text but also include text consisting of alphanumeric characters (Latin text). Hence, a submitted result for each task is evaluated in three ways: using Japanese only ground truth (GT), using Latin only GT and using combined GTs of both. Finally, by the submission deadline, we have received two submissions in the text localisation task of the still image mode. We intend to continue the competition in the open mode. Expecting further submissions, in this report we provide baseline results in all the tasks in addition to the submissions from the community.