Abstract: In the field of multimedia retrieval in video, text frame classification is essential for text detection, event detection, event boundary detection, etc. We propose a new text frame classification method that introduces a combination of wavelet and median moment with k-means clustering to select probable text blocks among 16 equally sized blocks of a video frame. The same feature combination is used with a new Max–Min clustering at the pixel level to choose probable dominant text pixels in the selected probable text blocks. For the probable text pixels, a so-called mutual nearest neighbor based symmetry is explored with a four-quadrant formation centered at the centroid of the probable dominant text pixels to know whether a block is a true text block or not. If a frame produces at least one true text block then it is considered as a text frame otherwise it is a non-text frame. Experimental results on different text and non-text datasets including two public datasets and our own created data show that the proposed method gives promising results in terms of recall and precision at the block and frame levels. Further, we also show how existing text detection methods tend to misclassify non-text frames as text frames in term of recall and precision at both the block and frame levels.

Abstract: This paper presents a syntactic model for architectural floor plan interpretation. A stochastic image grammar over an And-Or graph is inferred to represent the hierarchical, structural and semantic relations between elements of all possible floor plans. This grammar is augmented with three different probabilistic models, learnt from a training set, to account the frequency of that relations. Then, a Bottom-Up/Top-Down parser with a pruning strategy has been used for floor plan recognition. For a given input, the parser generates the most probable parse graph for that document. This graph not only contains the structural and semantic relations of its elements, but also its hierarchical composition, that allows to interpret the floor plan at different levels of abstraction.

Abstract: This paper presents a methodology for shape recognition that focuses on dealing with the difficult problem of large deformations. The proposed methodology consists in a novel feature extraction technique, which uses a non-rigid representation adaptable to the shape. This technique employs a deformable grid based on the computation of geometrical centroids that follows a region partitioning algorithm. Then, a feature vector is extracted by computing pixel density measures around these geometrical centroids. The result is a shape descriptor that adapts its representation to the given shape and encodes the pixel density distribution. The validity of the method when dealing with large deformations has been experimentally shown over datasets composed of handwritten shapes. It has been applied to signature verification and shape recognition tasks demonstrating high accuracy and low computational cost.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a circular blurred shape model descriptor to deal with the problem of symbol detection and classification as a particular case of object recognition. The feature extraction is performed by capturing the spatial arrangement of significant object characteristics in a correlogram structure. The shape information from objects is shared among correlogram regions, where a prior blurring degree defines the level of distortion allowed in the symbol, making the descriptor tolerant to irregular deformations. Moreover, the descriptor is rotation invariant by definition. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed descriptor in both the multiclass symbol recognition and symbol detection domains. In order to perform the symbol detection, the descriptors are learned using a cascade of classifiers. In the case of multiclass categorization, the new feature space is learned using a set of binary classifiers which are embedded in an error-correcting output code design. The results over four symbol data sets show the significant improvements of the proposed descriptor compared to the state-of-the-art descriptors. In particular, the results are even more significant in those cases where the symbols suffer from elastic deformations.

Abstract: To cope with the tremendous variations of writing styles encountered between different individuals, unconstrained automatic handwriting recognition systems need to be trained on large sets of labeled data. Traditionally, the training data has to be labeled manually, which is a laborious and costly process. Semi-supervised learning techniques offer methods to utilize unlabeled data, which can be obtained cheaply in large amounts in order, to reduce the need for labeled data. In this paper, we propose the use of Co-Training for improving the recognition accuracy of two weakly trained handwriting recognition systems. The first one is based on Recurrent Neural Networks while the second one is based on Hidden Markov Models. On the IAM off-line handwriting database we demonstrate a significant increase of the recognition accuracy can be achieved with Co-Training for single word recognition.