Abstract: Active learning aims to select samples to be annotated that yield the largest performance improvement for the learning algorithm. Many methods approach this problem by measuring the informativeness of samples and do this based on the certainty of the network predictions for samples. However, it is well-known that neural networks are overly confident about their prediction and are therefore an untrustworthy source to assess sample informativeness. In this paper, we propose a new informativeness-based active learning method. Our measure is derived from the learning dynamics of a neural network. More precisely we track the label assignment of the unlabeled data pool during the training of the algorithm. We capture the learning dynamics with a metric called label-dispersion, which is low when the network consistently assigns the same label to the sample during the training of the network and high when the assigned label changes frequently. We show that label-dispersion is a promising predictor of the uncertainty of the network, and show on two benchmark datasets that an active learning algorithm based on label-dispersion obtains excellent results.

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: Historical ciphered manuscripts are a type of document where graphical symbols are used to encrypt their content instead of regular text. Nowadays, expert transcriptions can be found in libraries alongside the corresponding manuscript images. However, those transcriptions are not aligned, so these are barely usable for training deep learning-based recognition methods. To solve this issue, we propose a method to align each symbol in the transcript of an image with its visual representation by using an attention-based Sequence to Sequence (Seq2Seq) model. The core idea is that, by learning to recognise symbols sequence within a cipher line image, the model also identifies their position implicitly through an attention mechanism. Thus, the resulting symbol segmentation can be later used for training algorithms. The experimental evaluation shows that this method is promising, especially taking into account the small size of the cipher dataset.

Abstract: This four-volume set of LNCS 12821, LNCS 12822, LNCS 12823 and LNCS 12824, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR 2021, held in Lausanne, Switzerland in September 2021. The 182 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 340 submissions, and are presented with 13 competition reports.
The papers are organized into the following topical sections: document analysis for literature search, document summarization and translation, multimedia document analysis, mobile text recognition, document analysis for social good, indexing and retrieval of documents, physical and logical layout analysis, recognition of tables and formulas, and natural language processing (NLP) for document understanding.

Abstract: Despite significant progress on current state-of-the-art image generation models, synthesis of document images containing multiple and complex object layouts is a challenging task. This paper presents a novel approach, called DocSynth, to automatically synthesize document images based on a given layout. In this work, given a spatial layout (bounding boxes with object categories) as a reference by the user, our proposed DocSynth model learns to generate a set of realistic document images consistent with the defined layout. Also, this framework has been adapted to this work as a superior baseline model for creating synthetic document image datasets for augmenting real data during training for document layout analysis tasks. Different sets of learning objectives have been also used to improve the model performance. Quantitatively, we also compare the generated results of our model with real data using standard evaluation metrics. The results highlight that our model can successfully generate realistic and diverse document images with multiple objects. We also present a comprehensive qualitative analysis summary of the different scopes of synthetic image generation tasks. Lastly, to our knowledge this is the first work of its kind.

Abstract: In this paper, we explore and evaluate the use of ranking-based objective functions for learning simultaneously a word string and a word image encoder. We consider retrieval frameworks in which the user expects a retrieval list ranked according to a defined relevance score. In the context of a word spotting problem, the relevance score has been set according to the string edit distance from the query string. We experimentally demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed model on query-by-string word spotting for both, handwritten and real scene word images. We also provide the results for query-by-example word spotting, although it is not the main focus of this work.

Abstract: Current tasks and methods in Document Understanding aims to process documents as single elements. However, documents are usually organized in collections (historical records, purchase invoices), that provide context useful for their interpretation. To address this problem, we introduce Document Collection Visual Question Answering (DocCVQA) a new dataset and related task, where questions are posed over a whole collection of document images and the goal is not only to provide the answer to the given question, but also to retrieve the set of documents that contain the information needed to infer the answer. Along with the dataset we propose a new evaluation metric and baselines which provide further insights to the new dataset and task.

Abstract: Session-based recommenders, used for making predictions out of users’ uninterrupted sequences of actions, are attractive for many applications. Here, for this task we propose using metric learning, where a common embedding space for sessions and items is created, and distance measures dissimilarity between the provided sequence of users’ events and the next action. We discuss and compare metric learning approaches to commonly used learning-to-rank methods, where some synergies exist. We propose a simple architecture for problem analysis and demonstrate that neither extensively big nor deep architectures are necessary in order to outperform existing methods. The experimental results against strong baselines on four datasets are provided with an ablation study.