Abstract: Text detection and recognition in a natural environment are key components of many applications, ranging from business card digitization to shop indexation in a street. This competition aims at assessing the ability of state-of-the-art methods to detect Multi-Lingual Text (MLT) in scene images, such as in contents gathered from the Internet media and in modern cities where multiple cultures live and communicate together. This competition is an extension of the Robust Reading Competition (RRC) which has been held since 2003 both in ICDAR and in an online context. The proposed competition is presented as a new challenge of the RRC. The dataset built for this challenge largely extends the previous RRC editions in many aspects: the multi-lingual text, the size of the dataset, the multi-oriented text, the wide variety of scenes. The dataset is comprised of 18,000 images which contain text belonging to 9 languages. The challenge is comprised of three tasks related to text detection and script classification. We have received a total of 16 participations from the research and industrial communities. This paper presents the dataset, the tasks and the findings of this RRC-MLT challenge.

Abstract: Visual Question Answering (VQA) is the task where given an image and a natural language question, the objective is to generate a natural language answer. At the intersection between computer vision and natural language processing, this task can be seen as a measure of image understanding capabilities, as it requires to reason about objects, actions, colors, positions, the relations between the different elements as well as commonsense reasoning, world knowledge, arithmetic skills and natural language understanding. However, even though the text present in the images conveys important semantically rich information that is explicit and not available in any other form, most VQA methods remained illiterate, largely
ignoring the text despite its potential significance. In this thesis, we set out on a journey to bring reading capabilities to computer vision models applied to the VQA task, creating new datasets and methods that can read, reason and integrate the text with other visual cues in natural scene images and documents.
In Chapter 3, we address the combination of scene text with visual information to fully understand all the nuances of natural scene images. To achieve this objective, we define a new sub-task of VQA that requires reading the text in the image, and highlight the limitations of the current methods. In addition, we propose a new architecture that integrates both modalities and jointly reasons about textual and visual features. In Chapter 5, we shift the domain of VQA with reading capabilities and apply it on scanned industry document images, providing a high-level end-purpose perspective to Document Understanding, which has been
primarily focused on digitizing the document’s contents and extracting key values without considering the ultimate purpose of the extracted information. For this, we create a dataset which requires methods to reason about the unique and challenging elements of documents, such as text, images, tables, graphs and complex layouts, to provide accurate answers in natural language. However, we observed that explicit visual features provide a slight contribution in the overall performance, since the main information is usually conveyed within the text and its position. In consequence, in Chapter 6, we propose VQA on infographic images, seeking for document images with more visually rich elements that require to fully exploit visual information in order to answer the questions. We show the performance gap of
different methods when used over industry scanned and infographic images, and propose a new method that integrates the visual features in early stages, which allows the transformer architecture to exploit the visual features during the self-attention operation. Instead, in Chapter 7, we apply VQA on a big collection of single-page documents, where the methods must find which documents are relevant to answer the question, and provide the answer itself. Finally, in Chapter 8, mimicking real-world application problems where systems must process documents with multiple pages, we address the multipage document visual question answering task. We demonstrate the limitations of existing methods, including models specifically designed to process long sequences. To overcome these limitations, we propose
a hierarchical architecture that can process long documents, answer questions, and provide the index of the page where the information to answer the question is located as an explainability measure.

Abstract: The Baix Llobregat (BALL) Demographic Database is an ongoing database project containing individual census data from the Catalan region of Baix Llobregat (Spain) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The BALL Database is built within the project ‘NETWORKS: Technology and citizen innovation for building historical social networks to understand the demographic past’ directed by Alícia Fornés from the Center for Computer Vision and Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora from the Center for Demographic Studies, both at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, funded by the Recercaixa program (2017–2019).
Its webpage is http://dag.cvc.uab.es/xarxes/.The aim of the project is to develop technologies facilitating massive digitalization of demographic sources, and more specifically the padrones (local censuses), in order to reconstruct historical ‘social’ networks employing computer vision technology. Such virtual networks can be created thanks to the linkage of nominative records compiled in the local censuses across time and space. Thus, digitized versions of individual and family lifespans are established, and individuals and families can be located spatially.