|
Jon Almazan, Albert Gordo, Alicia Fornes and Ernest Valveny. 2014. Segmentation-free Word Spotting with Exemplar SVMs. PR, 47(12), 3967–3978.
Abstract: In this paper we propose an unsupervised segmentation-free method for word spotting in document images. Documents are represented with a grid of HOG descriptors, and a sliding-window approach is used to locate the document regions that are most similar to the query. We use the Exemplar SVM framework to produce a better representation of the query in an unsupervised way. Then, we use a more discriminative representation based on Fisher Vector to rerank the best regions retrieved, and the most promising ones are used to expand the Exemplar SVM training set and improve the query representation. Finally, the document descriptors are precomputed and compressed with Product Quantization. This offers two advantages: first, a large number of documents can be kept in RAM memory at the same time. Second, the sliding window becomes significantly faster since distances between quantized HOG descriptors can be precomputed. Our results significantly outperform other segmentation-free methods in the literature, both in accuracy and in speed and memory usage.
Keywords: Word spotting; Segmentation-free; Unsupervised learning; Reranking; Query expansion; Compression
|
|
|
C. Alejandro Parraga, Jordi Roca, Dimosthenis Karatzas and Sophie Wuerger. 2014. Limitations of visual gamma corrections in LCD displays. Dis, 35(5), 227–239.
Abstract: A method for estimating the non-linear gamma transfer function of liquid–crystal displays (LCDs) without the need of a photometric measurement device was described by Xiao et al. (2011) [1]. It relies on observer’s judgments of visual luminance by presenting eight half-tone patterns with luminances from 1/9 to 8/9 of the maximum value of each colour channel. These half-tone patterns were distributed over the screen both over the vertical and horizontal viewing axes. We conducted a series of photometric and psychophysical measurements (consisting in the simultaneous presentation of half-tone patterns in each trial) to evaluate whether the angular dependency of the light generated by three different LCD technologies would bias the results of these gamma transfer function estimations. Our results show that there are significant differences between the gamma transfer functions measured and produced by observers at different viewing angles. We suggest appropriate modifications to the Xiao et al. paradigm to counterbalance these artefacts which also have the advantage of shortening the amount of time spent in collecting the psychophysical measurements.
Keywords: Display calibration; Psychophysics; Perceptual; Visual gamma correction; Luminance matching; Observer-based calibration
|
|
|
Marçal Rusiñol, Volkmar Frinken, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Andrew Bagdanov and Josep Llados. 2014. Multimodal page classification in administrative document image streams. IJDAR, 17(4), 331–341.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a page classification application in a banking workflow. The proposed architecture represents administrative document images by merging visual and textual descriptions. The visual description is based on a hierarchical representation of the pixel intensity distribution. The textual description uses latent semantic analysis to represent document content as a mixture of topics. Several off-the-shelf classifiers and different strategies for combining visual and textual cues have been evaluated. A final step uses an n-gram model of the page stream allowing a finer-grained classification of pages. The proposed method has been tested in a real large-scale environment and we report results on a dataset of 70,000 pages.
Keywords: Digital mail room; Multimodal page classification; Visual and textual document description
|
|
|
Francisco Alvaro, Francisco Cruz, Joan Andreu Sanchez, Oriol Ramos Terrades and Jose Miguel Benedi. 2015. Structure Detection and Segmentation of Documents Using 2D Stochastic Context-Free Grammars. NEUCOM, 150(A), 147–154.
Abstract: In this paper we dene a bidimensional extension of Stochastic Context-Free Grammars for structure detection and segmentation of images of documents.
Two sets of text classication features are used to perform an initial classication of each zone of the page. Then, the document segmentation is obtained as the most likely hypothesis according to a stochastic grammar. We used a dataset of historical marriage license books to validate this approach. We also tested several inference algorithms for Probabilistic Graphical Models
and the results showed that the proposed grammatical model outperformed
the other methods. Furthermore, grammars also provide the document structure
along with its segmentation.
Keywords: document image analysis; stochastic context-free grammars; text classication features
|
|
|
Lluis Pere de las Heras, Ernest Valveny and Gemma Sanchez. 2014. Unsupervised and Notation-Independent Wall Segmentation in Floor Plans Using a Combination of Statistical and Structural Strategies. Graphics Recognition. Current Trends and Challenges. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 109–121. (LNCS.)
Abstract: In this paper we present a wall segmentation approach in floor plans that is able to work independently to the graphical notation, does not need any pre-annotated data for learning, and is able to segment multiple-shaped walls such as beams and curved-walls. This method results from the combination of the wall segmentation approaches [3, 5] presented recently by the authors. Firstly, potential straight wall segments are extracted in an unsupervised way similar to [3], but restricting even more the wall candidates considered in the original approach. Then, based on [5], these segments are used to learn the texture pattern of walls and spot the lost instances. The presented combination of both methods has been tested on 4 available datasets with different notations and compared qualitatively and quantitatively to the state-of-the-art applied on these collections. Additionally, some qualitative results on floor plans directly downloaded from the Internet are reported in the paper. The overall performance of the method demonstrates either its adaptability to different wall notations and shapes, and to document qualities and resolutions.
Keywords: Graphics recognition; Floor plan analysis; Object segmentation
|
|
|
Lluis Pere de las Heras, David Fernandez, Alicia Fornes, Ernest Valveny, Gemma Sanchez and Josep Llados. 2014. Runlength Histogram Image Signature for Perceptual Retrieval of Architectural Floor Plans. Graphics Recognition. Current Trends and Challenges. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 135–146. (LNCS.)
Abstract: This paper proposes a runlength histogram signature as a perceptual descriptor of architectural plans in a retrieval scenario. The style of an architectural drawing is characterized by the perception of lines, shapes and texture. Such visual stimuli are the basis for defining semantic concepts as space properties, symmetry, density, etc. We propose runlength histograms extracted in vertical, horizontal and diagonal directions as a characterization of line and space properties in floorplans, so it can be roughly associated to a description of walls and room structure. A retrieval application illustrates the performance of the proposed approach, where given a plan as a query, similar ones are obtained from a database. A ground truth based on human observation has been constructed to validate the hypothesis. Additional retrieval results on sketched building’s facades are reported qualitatively in this paper. Its good description and its adaptability to two different sketch drawings despite its simplicity shows the interest of the proposed approach and opens a challenging research line in graphics recognition.
Keywords: Graphics recognition; Graphics retrieval; Image classification
|
|
|
Marçal Rusiñol, David Aldavert, Ricardo Toledo and Josep Llados. 2015. Efficient segmentation-free keyword spotting in historical document collections. PR, 48(2), 545–555.
Abstract: In this paper we present an efficient segmentation-free word spotting method, applied in the context of historical document collections, that follows the query-by-example paradigm. We use a patch-based framework where local patches are described by a bag-of-visual-words model powered by SIFT descriptors. By projecting the patch descriptors to a topic space with the latent semantic analysis technique and compressing the descriptors with the product quantization method, we are able to efficiently index the document information both in terms of memory and time. The proposed method is evaluated using four different collections of historical documents achieving good performances on both handwritten and typewritten scenarios. The yielded performances outperform the recent state-of-the-art keyword spotting approaches.
Keywords: Historical documents; Keyword spotting; Segmentation-free; Dense SIFT features; Latent semantic analysis; Product quantization
|
|
|
Lluis Pere de las Heras, Oriol Ramos Terrades, Sergi Robles and Gemma Sanchez. 2015. CVC-FP and SGT: a new database for structural floor plan analysis and its groundtruthing tool. IJDAR, 18(1), 15–30.
Abstract: Recent results on structured learning methods have shown the impact of structural information in a wide range of pattern recognition tasks. In the field of document image analysis, there is a long experience on structural methods for the analysis and information extraction of multiple types of documents. Yet, the lack of conveniently annotated and free access databases has not benefited the progress in some areas such as technical drawing understanding. In this paper, we present a floor plan database, named CVC-FP, that is annotated for the architectural objects and their structural relations. To construct this database, we have implemented a groundtruthing tool, the SGT tool, that allows to make specific this sort of information in a natural manner. This tool has been made for general purpose groundtruthing: It allows to define own object classes and properties, multiple labeling options are possible, grants the cooperative work, and provides user and version control. We finally have collected some of the recent work on floor plan interpretation and present a quantitative benchmark for this database. Both CVC-FP database and the SGT tool are freely released to the research community to ease comparisons between methods and boost reproducible research.
|
|
|
Alicia Fornes, V.C.Kieu, M. Visani, N.Journet and Anjan Dutta. 2014. The ICDAR/GREC 2013 Music Scores Competition: Staff Removal. In B.Lamiroy and J.-M. Ogier, eds. Graphics Recognition. Current Trends and Challenges. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 207–220. (LNCS.)
Abstract: The first competition on music scores that was organized at ICDAR and GREC in 2011 awoke the interest of researchers, who participated in both staff removal and writer identification tasks. In this second edition, we focus on the staff removal task and simulate a real case scenario concerning old and degraded music scores. For this purpose, we have generated a new set of semi-synthetic images using two degradation models that we previously introduced: local noise and 3D distortions. In this extended paper we provide an extended description of the dataset, degradation models, evaluation metrics, the participant’s methods and the obtained results that could not be presented at ICDAR and GREC proceedings due to page limitations.
Keywords: Competition; Graphics recognition; Music scores; Writer identification; Staff removal
|
|
|
G.Thorvaldsen and 6 others. 2015. A Tale of two Transcriptions.
Abstract: non-indexed
This article explains how two projects implement semi-automated transcription routines: for census sheets in Norway and marriage protocols from Barcelona. The Spanish system was created to transcribe the marriage license books from 1451 to 1905 for the Barcelona area; one of the world’s longest series of preserved vital records. Thus, in the Project “Five Centuries of Marriages” (5CofM) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s Center for Demographic Studies, the Barcelona Historical Marriage Database has been built. More than 600,000 records were transcribed by 150 transcribers working online. The Norwegian material is cross-sectional as it is the 1891 census, recorded on one sheet per person. This format and the underlining of keywords for several variables made it more feasible to semi-automate data entry than when many persons are listed on the same page. While Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for printed text is scientifically mature, computer vision research is now focused on more difficult problems such as handwriting recognition. In the marriage project, document analysis methods have been proposed to automatically recognize the marriage licenses. Fully automatic recognition is still a challenge, but some promising results have been obtained. In Spain, Norway and elsewhere the source material is available as scanned pictures on the Internet, opening up the possibility for further international cooperation concerning automating the transcription of historic source materials. Like what is being done in projects to digitize printed materials, the optimal solution is likely to be a combination of manual transcription and machine-assisted recognition also for hand-written sources.
Keywords: Nominative Sources; Census; Vital Records; Computer Vision; Optical Character Recognition; Word Spotting
|
|