Abstract: Despite the latest advances in Deep Learning, the recognition of handwritten music scores is still a challenging endeavour. Even though the recent Sequence to Sequence(Seq2Seq) architectures have demonstrated its capacity to reliably recognise handwritten text, their performance is still far from satisfactory when applied to historical handwritten scores. Indeed, the ambiguous nature of handwriting, the non-standard musical notation employed by composers of the time and the decaying state of old paper make these scores remarkably difficult to read, sometimes even by trained humans. Thus, in this work we explore the incorporation of language models into a Seq2Seq-based architecture to try to improve transcriptions where the aforementioned unclear writing produces statistically unsound mistakes, which as far as we know, has never been attempted for this field of research on this architecture. After studying various Language Model integration techniques, the experimental evaluation on historical handwritten music scores shows a significant improvement over the state of the art, showing that this is a promising research direction for dealing with such difficult manuscripts.

Abstract: Despite the “paperless office” ideal that started in the decade of the seventies, businesses still strive against an increasing amount of paper documentation. Companies still receive huge amounts of paper documentation that need to be analyzed and processed, mostly in a manual way. A solution for this task consists in, first, automatically scanning the incoming documents. Then, document images can be analyzed and information can be extracted from the data. Documents can also be automatically dispatched to the appropriate workflows, used to retrieve similar documents in the dataset to transfer information, etc.
Due to the nature of this “digital mailroom”, we need document representation methods to be general, i.e., able to cope with very different types of documents. We need the methods to be sound, i.e., able to cope with unexpected types of documents, noise, etc. And, we need to methods to be scalable, i.e., able to cope with thousands or millions of documents that need to be processed, stored, and consulted. Unfortunately, current techniques of document representation, classification and retrieval are not apt for this digital mailroom framework, since they do not fulfill some or all of these requirements.
Through this thesis we focus on the problem of document representation aimed at classification and retrieval tasks under this digital mailroom framework. We first propose a novel document representation based on runlength histograms, and extend it to cope with more complex documents such as multiple-page documents, or documents that contain more sources of information such as extracted OCR text. Then we focus on the scalability requirements and propose a novel binarization method which we dubbed PCAE, as well as two general asymmetric distances between binary embeddings that can significantly improve the retrieval results at a minimal extra computational cost. Finally, we note the importance of supervised learning when performing large-scale retrieval, and study several approaches that can significantly boost the results at no extra cost at query time.

Abstract: Despite recent advances in automatic text recognition, the performance remains moderate when it comes to historical manuscripts. This is mainly because of the scarcity of available labelled data to train the data-hungry Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) models. The Keyword Spotting System (KWS) provides a valid alternative to HTR due to the reduction in error rate, but it is usually limited to a closed reference vocabulary. In this paper, we propose a few-shot learning paradigm for spotting sequences of a few characters (N-gram) that requires a small amount of labelled training data. We exhibit that recognition of important n-grams could reduce the system’s dependency on vocabulary. In this case, an out-of-vocabulary (OOV) word in an input handwritten line image could be a sequence of n-grams that belong to the lexicon. An extensive experimental evaluation of our proposed multi-representation approach was carried out on a subset of Bentham’s historical manuscript collections to obtain some really promising results in this direction.

Abstract: Despite decades of research in Optical Music Recognition (OMR), the recognition of old handwritten music scores remains a challenge because of the variabilities in the handwriting styles, paper degradation, lack of standard notation, etc. Therefore, the research in OMR systems adapted to the particularities of old manuscripts is crucial to accelerate the conversion of music scores existing in archives into digital libraries, fostering the dissemination and preservation of our music heritage. In this paper we explore the adaptation of sequence-to-sequence models with attention mechanism (used in translation and handwritten text recognition) and the generation of specific synthetic data for recognizing old music scores. The experimental validation demonstrates that our approach is promising, especially when compared with long short-term memory neural networks.

Abstract: Date estimation of historical document images is a challenging problem, with several contributions in the literature that lack of the ability to generalize from one dataset to others. This paper presents a robust date estimation system based in a retrieval approach that generalizes well in front of heterogeneous collections. We use a ranking loss function named smooth-nDCG to train a Convolutional Neural Network that learns an ordination of documents for each problem. One of the main usages of the presented approach is as a tool for historical contextual retrieval. It means that scholars could perform comparative analysis of historical images from big datasets in terms of the period where they were produced. We provide experimental evaluation on different types of documents from real datasets of manuscript and newspaper images.