Abstract: During the last years, graph-based representations are experiencing a growing usage in visual recognition and retrieval due to their ability to capture both structural and appearance-based information. Thus, they provide a greater representational power than classical statistical frameworks. However, graph-based representations leads to high computational complexities usually dealt by graph embeddings or approximated matching techniques. Despite their representational power, they are very sensitive to noise and small variations of the input image. With the aim to cope with the time complexity and the variability present in the generated graphs, in this paper we propose to construct a novel hierarchical graph representation. Graph clustering techniques adapted from social media analysis have been used in order to contract a graph at different abstraction levels while keeping information about the topology. Abstract nodes attributes summarise information about the contracted graph partition. For the proposed representations, a coarse-to-fine matching technique is defined. Hence, small graphs are used as a filtering before more accurate matching methods are applied. This approach has been validated in real scenarios such as classification of colour images or retrieval of handwritten words (i.e. word spotting).

Abstract: During recent years, there here has been a boom in terms of deep learning use for handwriting analysis and recognition. One main application for handwriting analysis is early detection and diagnosis in the health field. Unfortunately, most real case problems still suffer a scarcity of data, which makes difficult the use of deep learning-based models. To alleviate this problem, some works resort to synthetic data generation. Lately, more works are directed towards guided data synthetic generation, a generation that uses the domain and data knowledge to generate realistic data that can be useful to train deep learning models. In this work, we combine the domain knowledge about the Alzheimer’s disease for handwriting and use it for a more guided data generation. Concretely, we have explored the use of in-air movements for synthetic data generation.

Abstract: Documents often exhibit various forms of degradation, which make it hard to be read and substantially deteriorate the performance of an OCR system. In this paper, we propose an effective end-to-end framework named Document Enhancement Generative Adversarial Networks (DE-GAN) that uses the conditional GANs (cGANs) to restore severely degraded document images. To the best of our knowledge, this practice has not been studied within the context of generative adversarial deep networks. We demonstrate that, in different tasks (document clean up, binarization, deblurring and watermark removal), DE-GAN can produce an enhanced version of the degraded document with a high quality. In addition, our approach provides consistent improvements compared to state-of-the-art methods over the widely used DIBCO 2013, DIBCO 2017 and H-DIBCO 2018 datasets, proving its ability to restore a degraded document image to its ideal condition. The obtained results on a wide variety of degradation reveal the flexibility of the proposed model to be exploited in other document enhancement problems.

Abstract: Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) is a fast growing branch of document understanding. Despite the fact that documents contain sensitive or copyrighted information, none of the current DocVQA methods offers strong privacy guarantees.
In this work, we explore privacy in the domain of DocVQA for the first time. We highlight privacy issues in state of the art multi-modal LLM models used for DocVQA, and explore possible solutions.
Specifically, we focus on the invoice processing use case as a realistic, widely used scenario for document understanding, and propose a large scale DocVQA dataset comprising invoice documents and associated questions and answers. We employ a federated learning scheme, that reflects the real-life distribution of documents in different businesses, and we explore the use case where the ID of the invoice issuer is the sensitive information to be protected.
We demonstrate that non-private models tend to memorise, behaviour that can lead to exposing private information. We then evaluate baseline training schemes employing federated learning and differential privacy in this multi-modal scenario, where the sensitive information might be exposed through any of the two input modalities: vision (document image) or language (OCR tokens).
Finally, we design an attack exploiting the memorisation effect of the model, and demonstrate its effectiveness in probing different DocVQA models.

Abstract: Document Layout Analysis (DLA) is the process of automatically identifying and categorizing the structural components (e.g. Text, Figure, Table, etc.) within a document to extract meaningful content and establish the page's layout structure. It is a crucial stage in document parsing, contributing to their comprehension. However, traditional DLA approaches often demand a significant volume of labeled training data, and the labor-intensive task of generating high-quality annotated training data poses a substantial challenge. In order to address this challenge, we proposed a semi-supervised setting that aims to perform learning on limited annotated categories by eliminating exhaustive and expensive mask annotations. The proposed setting is expected to be generalizable to novel categories as it learns the underlying positional information through a support set and class information through Co-Occurrence that can be generalized from annotated categories to novel categories. Here, we first extract features from the input image and support set with a shared multi-scale feature acquisition backbone. Then, the extracted feature representation is fed to the transformer encoder as a query. Later on, we utilize a semantic embedding network before the decoder to capture the underlying semantic relationships and similarities between different instances, enabling the model to make accurate predictions or classifications with only a limited amount of labeled data. Extensive experimentation on competitive benchmarks like PRIMA, DocLayNet, and Historical Japanese (HJ) demonstrate that this generalized setup obtains significant performance compared to the conventional supervised approach.