Abstract: Text detection and recognition in a natural environment are key components of many applications, ranging from business card digitization to shop indexation in a street. This competition aims at assessing the ability of state-of-the-art methods to detect Multi-Lingual Text (MLT) in scene images, such as in contents gathered from the Internet media and in modern cities where multiple cultures live and communicate together. This competition is an extension of the Robust Reading Competition (RRC) which has been held since 2003 both in ICDAR and in an online context. The proposed competition is presented as a new challenge of the RRC. The dataset built for this challenge largely extends the previous RRC editions in many aspects: the multi-lingual text, the size of the dataset, the multi-oriented text, the wide variety of scenes. The dataset is comprised of 18,000 images which contain text belonging to 9 languages. The challenge is comprised of three tasks related to text detection and script classification. We have received a total of 16 participations from the research and industrial communities. This paper presents the dataset, the tasks and the findings of this RRC-MLT challenge.

Abstract: Text line segmentation in handwritten documents is an important task in the recognition of historical documents. Handwritten document images contain text lines with multiple orientations, touching and overlapping characters between consecutive text lines and different document structures, making line segmentation a difficult task. In this paper, we present a new approach for handwritten text line segmentation solving the problems of touching components, curvilinear text lines and horizontally overlapping components. The proposed algorithm formulates line segmentation as finding the central path in the area between two consecutive lines. This is solved as a graph traversal problem. A graph is constructed using the skeleton of the image. Then, a path-finding algorithm is used to find the optimum path between text lines. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on a comprehensive dataset consisting of five databases: ICDAR2009, ICDAR2013, UMD, the George Washington and the Barcelona Marriages Database. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art considering the different types and difficulties of the benchmarking data.

Abstract: Text understanding in scene images has gained plenty of attention in the computer vision community and it is an important task in many applications as text carries semantically rich information about scene content and context. For instance, reading text in a scene can be applied to autonomous driving, scene understanding or assisting visually impaired people. The general aim of scene text understanding is to localize and recognize text in scene images. Text regions are first localized in the original image by a trained detector model and afterwards fed into a recognition module. The tasks of localization and recognition are highly correlated since an inaccurate localization can affect the recognition task.
The main purpose of this thesis is to devise efficient methods for scene text understanding. We investigate how the latest results on deep learning can advance text understanding pipelines. Recently, Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) and derived methods have achieved a significant performance on semantic segmentation and pixel level classification tasks. Therefore, we took benefit of the strengths of FCN approaches in order to detect text in natural scenes. In this thesis we have focused on two challenging tasks of scene text understanding which are Text Detection and Word Spotting. For the task of text detection, we have proposed an efficient text proposal technique in scene images. We have considered the Text Proposals method as the baseline which is an approach to reduce the search space of possible text regions in an image. In order to improve the Text Proposals method we combined it with Fully Convolutional Networks to efficiently reduce the number of proposals while maintaining the same level of accuracy and thus gaining a significant speed up. Our experiments demonstrate that this text proposal approach yields significantly higher recall rates than the line based text localization techniques, while also producing better-quality localization. We have also applied this technique on compressed images such as videos from wearable egocentric cameras. For the task of word spotting, we have introduced a novel mid-level word representation method. We have proposed a technique to create and exploit an intermediate representation of images based on text attributes which roughly correspond to character probability maps. Our representation extends the concept of Pyramidal Histogram Of Characters (PHOC) by exploiting Fully Convolutional Networks to derive a pixel-wise mapping of the character distribution within candidate word regions. We call this representation the Soft-PHOC. Furthermore, we show how to use Soft-PHOC descriptors for word spotting tasks through an efficient text line proposal algorithm. To evaluate the detected text, we propose a novel line based evaluation along with the classic bounding box based approach. We test our method on incidental scene text images which comprises real-life scenarios such as urban scenes. The importance of incidental scene text images is due to the complexity of backgrounds, perspective, variety of script and language, short text and little linguistic context. All of these factors together makes the incidental scene text images challenging.

Abstract: Textual information found in scene images provides high level semantic information about the image and its context and it can be leveraged for better scene understanding. In this paper we address the problem of scene text retrieval: given a text query, the system must return all images containing the queried text. The novelty of the proposed model consists in the usage of a single shot CNN architecture that predicts at the same time bounding boxes and a compact text representation of the words in them. In this way, the text based image retrieval task can be casted as a simple nearest neighbor search of the query text representation over the outputs of the CNN over the entire image
database. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed architecture
outperforms previous state-of-the-art while it offers a significant increase
in processing speed.

Abstract: The ICDAR Robust Reading Competition (RRC), initiated in 2003 and re-established in 2011, has become the defacto evaluation standard for the international community. Concurrent with its second incarnation in 2011, a continuous effort started to develop an online framework to facilitate the hosting and management of competitions. This short paper briefly outlines the Robust Reading Competition Annotation and Evaluation Platform, the backbone of the Robust Reading Competition, comprising a collection of tools and processes that aim to simplify the management and annotation
of data, and to provide online and offline performance evaluation and analysis services