Abstract: Sequence-to-sequence models have recently become very popular for tackling
handwritten word recognition problems. However, how to effectively integrate an external language model into such recognizer is still a challenging
problem. The main challenge faced when training a language model is to
deal with the language model corpus which is usually different to the one
used for training the handwritten word recognition system. Thus, the bias
between both word corpora leads to incorrectness on the transcriptions, providing similar or even worse performances on the recognition task. In this
work, we introduce Candidate Fusion, a novel way to integrate an external
language model to a sequence-to-sequence architecture. Moreover, it provides suggestions from an external language knowledge, as a new input to
the sequence-to-sequence recognizer. Hence, Candidate Fusion provides two
improvements. On the one hand, the sequence-to-sequence recognizer has
the flexibility not only to combine the information from itself and the language model, but also to choose the importance of the information provided
by the language model. On the other hand, the external language model
has the ability to adapt itself to the training corpus and even learn the
most commonly errors produced from the recognizer. Finally, by conducting
comprehensive experiments, the Candidate Fusion proves to outperform the
state-of-the-art language models for handwritten word recognition tasks.

Abstract: This paper proposes Convolve, Attend and Spell, an attention based sequence-to-sequence model for handwritten word recognition. The proposed architecture has three main parts: an encoder, consisting of a CNN and a bi-directional GRU, an attention mechanism devoted to focus on the pertinent features and a decoder formed by a one-directional GRU, able to spell the corresponding word, character by character. Compared with the recent state-of-the-art, our model achieves competitive results on the IAM dataset without needing any pre-processing step, predefined lexicon nor language model. Code and additional results are available in https://github.com/omni-us/research-seq2seq-HTR.

Abstract: Graph-based representations are the most powerful data structures for extracting, representing and preserving the structural information of underlying data. Subgraph spotting is an interesting research problem, especially for studying and investigating the structural information based content-based image retrieval (CBIR) and query by example (QBE) in image databases. In this paper we address the problem of lack of freely available ground-truthed datasets for subgraph spotting and present a new dataset for subgraph spotting in graph representations of comic book images (SSGCI) with its ground-truth and evaluation protocol. Experimental results of two state-of-the-art methods of subgraph spotting are presented on the new SSGCI dataset.

Abstract: 0,624 JCR
Word spotting is the process of retrieving all instances of a queried keyword from a digital library of document images. In this paper we evaluate the performance of different word descriptors to assess the advantages and disadvantages of statistical and structural models in a framework of query-by-example word spotting in historical documents. We compare four word representation models, namely sequence alignment using DTW as a baseline reference, a bag of visual words approach as statistical model, a pseudo-structural model based on a Loci features representation, and a structural approach where words are represented by graphs. The four approaches have been tested with two collections of historical data: the George Washington database and the marriage records from the Barcelona Cathedral. We experimentally demonstrate that statistical representations generally give a better performance, however it cannot be neglected that large descriptors are difficult to be implemented in a retrieval scenario where word spotting requires the indexation of data with million word images.