Abstract: Word spotting is an important recognition task in large-scale retrieval of document collections. In most of the cases, methods are developed and evaluated assuming perfect word segmentation. In this paper, we propose an experimental framework to quantify the goodness that word segmentation has on the performance achieved by word spotting methods in identical unbiased conditions. The framework consists of generating systematic distortions on segmentation and retrieving the original queries from the distorted dataset. We have tested our framework on several established and state-of-the-art methods using George Washington and Barcelona Marriage Datasets. The experiments done allow for an estimate of the end-to-end performance of word spotting methods.

Abstract: Offline signature verification is one of the most challenging tasks in biometrics and document forensics. Unlike other verification problems, it needs to model minute but critical details between genuine and forged signatures, because a skilled falsification might often resembles the real signature with small deformation. This verification task is even harder in writer independent scenarios which is undeniably fiscal for realistic cases. In this paper, we model an offline writer independent signature verification task with a convolutional Siamese network. Siamese networks are twin networks with shared weights, which can be trained to learn a feature space where similar observations are placed in proximity. This is achieved by exposing the network to a pair of similar and dissimilar observations and minimizing the Euclidean distance between similar pairs while simultaneously maximizing it between dissimilar pairs. Experiments conducted on cross-domain datasets emphasize the capability of our network to model forgery in different languages (scripts) and handwriting styles. Moreover, our designed Siamese network, named SigNet, exceeds the state-of-the-art results on most of the benchmark signature datasets, which paves the way for further research in this direction.

Abstract: In this work we introduce a cross modal image retrieval system that allows both text and sketch as input modalities for the query. A cross-modal deep network architecture is formulated to jointly model the sketch and text input modalities as well as the the image output modality, learning a common embedding between text and images and between sketches and images. In addition, an attention model is used to selectively focus the attention on the different objects of the image, allowing for retrieval with multiple objects in the query. Experiments show that the proposed method performs the best in both single and multiple object image retrieval in standard datasets.

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the problem of zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR), where human sketches are used as queries to conduct retrieval of photos from unseen categories. We importantly advance prior arts by proposing a novel ZS-SBIR scenario that represents a firm step forward in its practical application. The new setting uniquely recognizes two important yet often neglected challenges of practical ZS-SBIR, (i) the large domain gap between amateur sketch and photo, and (ii) the necessity for moving towards large-scale retrieval. We first contribute to the community a novel ZS-SBIR dataset, QuickDraw-Extended, that consists of 330,000 sketches and 204,000 photos spanning across 110 categories. Highly abstract amateur human sketches are purposefully sourced to maximize the domain gap, instead of ones included in existing datasets that can often be semi-photorealistic. We then formulate a ZS-SBIR framework to jointly model sketches and photos into a common embedding space. A novel strategy to mine the mutual information among domains is specifically engineered to alleviate the domain gap. External semantic knowledge is further embedded to aid semantic transfer. We show that, rather surprisingly, retrieval performance significantly outperforms that of state-of-the-art on existing datasets that can already be achieved using a reduced version of our model. We further demonstrate the superior performance of our full model by comparing with a number of alternatives on the newly proposed dataset. The new dataset, plus all training and testing code of our model, will be publicly released to facilitate future research.

Abstract: This paper introduces the DocILE benchmark with the largest dataset of business documents for the tasks of Key Information Localization and Extraction and Line Item Recognition. It contains 6.7k annotated business documents, 100k synthetically generated documents, and nearly 1M unlabeled documents for unsupervised pre-training. The dataset has been built with knowledge of domain- and task-specific aspects, resulting in the following key features: (i) annotations in 55 classes, which surpasses the granularity of previously published key information extraction datasets by a large margin; (ii) Line Item Recognition represents a highly practical information extraction task, where key information has to be assigned to items in a table; (iii) documents come from numerous layouts and the test set includes zero- and few-shot cases as well as layouts commonly seen in the training set. The benchmark comes with several baselines, including RoBERTa, LayoutLMv3 and DETR-based Table Transformer; applied to both tasks of the DocILE benchmark, with results shared in this paper, offering a quick starting point for future work. The dataset, baselines and supplementary material are available at https://github.com/rossumai/docile.