|
Ruben Tito, Dimosthenis Karatzas and Ernest Valveny. 2021. Document Collection Visual Question Answering. 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.778–792. (LNCS.)
Abstract: Current tasks and methods in Document Understanding aims to process documents as single elements. However, documents are usually organized in collections (historical records, purchase invoices), that provide context useful for their interpretation. To address this problem, we introduce Document Collection Visual Question Answering (DocCVQA) a new dataset and related task, where questions are posed over a whole collection of document images and the goal is not only to provide the answer to the given question, but also to retrieve the set of documents that contain the information needed to infer the answer. Along with the dataset we propose a new evaluation metric and baselines which provide further insights to the new dataset and task.
Keywords: Document collection; Visual Question Answering
|
|
|
Juan Ignacio Toledo, Sounak Dey, Alicia Fornes and Josep Llados. 2017. Handwriting Recognition by Attribute embedding and Recurrent Neural Networks. 14th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.1038–1043.
Abstract: Handwriting recognition consists in obtaining the transcription of a text image. Recent word spotting methods based on attribute embedding have shown good performance when recognizing words. However, they are holistic methods in the sense that they recognize the word as a whole (i.e. they find the closest word in the lexicon to the word image). Consequently,
these kinds of approaches are not able to deal with out of vocabulary words, which are common in historical manuscripts. Also, they cannot be extended to recognize text lines. In order to address these issues, in this paper we propose a handwriting recognition method that adapts the attribute embedding to sequence learning. Concretely, the method learns the attribute embedding of patches of word images with a convolutional neural network. Then, these embeddings are presented as a sequence to a recurrent neural network that produces the transcription. We obtain promising results even without the use of any kind of dictionary or language model
|
|
|
Juan Ignacio Toledo, Jordi Cucurull, Jordi Puiggali, Alicia Fornes and Josep Llados. 2015. Document Analysis Techniques for Automatic Electoral Document Processing: A Survey. E-Voting and Identity, Proceedings of 5th international conference, VoteID 2015.139–141. (LNCS.)
Abstract: In this paper, we will discuss the most common challenges in electoral document processing and study the different solutions from the document analysis community that can be applied in each case. We will cover Optical Mark Recognition techniques to detect voter selections in the Australian Ballot, handwritten number recognition for preferential elections and handwriting recognition for write-in areas. We will also propose some particular adjustments that can be made to those general techniques in the specific context of electoral documents.
Keywords: Document image analysis; Computer vision; Paper ballots; Paper based elections; Optical scan; Tally
|
|
|
Juan Ignacio Toledo, Manuel Carbonell, Alicia Fornes and Josep Llados. 2019. Information Extraction from Historical Handwritten Document Images with a Context-aware Neural Model. PR, 86, 27–36.
Abstract: Many historical manuscripts that hold trustworthy memories of the past societies contain information organized in a structured layout (e.g. census, birth or marriage records). The precious information stored in these documents cannot be effectively used nor accessed without costly annotation efforts. The transcription driven by the semantic categories of words is crucial for the subsequent access. In this paper we describe an approach to extract information from structured historical handwritten text images and build a knowledge representation for the extraction of meaning out of historical data. The method extracts information, such as named entities, without the need of an intermediate transcription step, thanks to the incorporation of context information through language models. Our system has two variants, the first one is based on bigrams, whereas the second one is based on recurrent neural networks. Concretely, our second architecture integrates a Convolutional Neural Network to model visual information from word images together with a Bidirecitonal Long Short Term Memory network to model the relation among the words. This integrated sequential approach is able to extract more information than just the semantic category (e.g. a semantic category can be associated to a person in a record). Our system is generic, it deals with out-of-vocabulary words by design, and it can be applied to structured handwritten texts from different domains. The method has been validated with the ICDAR IEHHR competition protocol, outperforming the existing approaches.
Keywords: Document image analysis; Handwritten documents; Named entity recognition; Deep neural networks
|
|
|
Adarsh Tiwari, Sanket Biswas and Josep Llados. 2023. Can Pre-trained Language Models Help in Understanding Handwritten Symbols? 17th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.199–211.
Abstract: The emergence of transformer models like BERT, GPT-2, GPT-3, RoBERTa, T5 for natural language understanding tasks has opened the floodgates towards solving a wide array of machine learning tasks in other modalities like images, audio, music, sketches and so on. These language models are domain-agnostic and as a result could be applied to 1-D sequences of any kind. However, the key challenge lies in bridging the modality gap so that they could generate strong features beneficial for out-of-domain tasks. This work focuses on leveraging the power of such pre-trained language models and discusses the challenges in predicting challenging handwritten symbols and alphabets.
|
|
|
Pau Torras, Arnau Baro, Lei Kang and Alicia Fornes. 2021. On the Integration of Language Models into Sequence to Sequence Architectures for Handwritten Music Recognition. International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference.690–696.
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.
|
|
|
Pau Torras, Arnau Baro, Alicia Fornes and Lei Kang. 2022. Improving Handwritten Music Recognition through Language Model Integration. 4th International Workshop on Reading Music Systems (WoRMS2022).42–46.
Abstract: Handwritten Music Recognition, especially in the historical domain, is an inherently challenging endeavour; paper degradation artefacts and the ambiguous nature of handwriting make recognising such scores an error-prone process, even for the current state-of-the-art Sequence to Sequence models. In this work we propose a way of reducing the production of statistically implausible output sequences by fusing a Language Model into a recognition Sequence to Sequence model. The idea is leveraging visually-conditioned and context-conditioned output distributions in order to automatically find and correct any mistakes that would otherwise break context significantly. We have found this approach to improve recognition results to 25.15 SER (%) from a previous best of 31.79 SER (%) in the literature.
Keywords: optical music recognition; historical sources; diversity; music theory; digital humanities
|
|
|
Salvatore Tabbone and Oriol Ramos Terrades. 2014. An Overview of Symbol Recognition. In D. Doermann and K. Tombre, eds. Handbook of Document Image Processing and Recognition. Springer London, 523–551.
Abstract: According to the Cambridge Dictionaries Online, a symbol is a sign, shape, or object that is used to represent something else. Symbol recognition is a subfield of general pattern recognition problems that focuses on identifying, detecting, and recognizing symbols in technical drawings, maps, or miscellaneous documents such as logos and musical scores. This chapter aims at providing the reader an overview of the different existing ways of describing and recognizing symbols and how the field has evolved to attain a certain degree of maturity.
Keywords: Pattern recognition; Shape descriptors; Structural descriptors; Symbolrecognition; Symbol spotting
|
|
|
Stepan Simsa and 10 others. 2023. Overview of DocILE 2023: Document Information Localization and Extraction. International Conference of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum for European Languages.276–293. (LNCS.)
Abstract: This paper provides an overview of the DocILE 2023 Competition, its tasks, participant submissions, the competition results and possible future research directions. This first edition of the competition focused on two Information Extraction tasks, Key Information Localization and Extraction (KILE) and Line Item Recognition (LIR). Both of these tasks require detection of pre-defined categories of information in business documents. The second task additionally requires correctly grouping the information into tuples, capturing the structure laid out in the document. The competition used the recently published DocILE dataset and benchmark that stays open to new submissions. The diversity of the participant solutions indicates the potential of the dataset as the submissions included pure Computer Vision, pure Natural Language Processing, as well as multi-modal solutions and utilized all of the parts of the dataset, including the annotated, synthetic and unlabeled subsets.
Keywords: Information Extraction; Computer Vision; Natural Language Processing; Optical Character Recognition; Document Understanding
|
|
|
N. Serrano, L. Tarazon, D. Perez, Oriol Ramos Terrades and S. Juan. 2010. The GIDOC Prototype. 10th International Workshop on Pattern Recognition in Information Systems.82–89.
Abstract: Transcription of handwritten text in (old) documents is an important, time-consuming task for digital libraries. It might be carried out by first processing all document images off-line, and then manually supervising system transcriptions to edit incorrect parts. However, current techniques for automatic page layout analysis, text line detection and handwriting recognition are still far from perfect, and thus post-editing system output is not clearly better than simply ignoring it.
A more effective approach to transcribe old text documents is to follow an interactive- predictive paradigm in which both, the system is guided by the user, and the user is assisted by the system to complete the transcription task as efficiently as possible. Following this approach, a system prototype called GIDOC (Gimp-based Interactive transcription of old text DOCuments) has been developed to provide user-friendly, integrated support for interactive-predictive layout analysis, line detection and handwriting transcription.
GIDOC is designed to work with (large) collections of homogeneous documents, that is, of similar structure and writing styles. They are annotated sequentially, by (par- tially) supervising hypotheses drawn from statistical models that are constantly updated with an increasing number of available annotated documents. And this is done at different annotation levels. For instance, at the level of page layout analysis, GIDOC uses a novel text block detection method in which conventional, memoryless techniques are improved with a “history” model of text block positions. Similarly, at the level of text line image transcription, GIDOC includes a handwriting recognizer which is steadily improved with a growing number of (partially) supervised transcriptions.
|
|