Abstract: This paper presents a new model for the description and recognition of distorted shapes, where the image is represented by a pixel density distribution based on the Blurred Shape Model combined with a non-linear image deformation model. This leads to an adaptive structure able to capture elastic deformations in shapes. This method has been evaluated using thee different datasets where deformations are present, showing the robustness and good performance of the new model. Moreover, we show that incorporating deformation and flexibility, the new model outperforms the BSM approach when classifying shapes with high variability of appearance.

Abstract: In this paper we propose an error tolerant subgraph matching algorithm based on bag-of-paths for solving the problem of symbol spotting in line drawings. Bag-of-paths is a factorized representation of graphs where the factorization is done by considering all the acyclic paths between each pair of connected nodes. Similar paths within the whole collection of documents are clustered and organized in a lookup table for efficient indexing. The lookup table contains the index key of each cluster and the corresponding list of locations as a single entry. The mean path of each of the clusters serves as the index key for each table entry. The spotting method is then formulated by a spatial voting scheme to the list of locations of the paths that are decided in terms of search of similar paths that compose the query symbol. Efficient indexing of common substructures helps to reduce the computational burden of usual graph based methods. The proposed method can also be seen as a way to serialize graphs which allows to reduce the complexity of the subgraph isomorphism. We have encoded the paths in terms of both attributed strings and turning functions, and presented a comparative results between them within the symbol spotting framework. Experimentations for matching different shape silhouettes are also reported and the method has been proved to work in noisy environment also.

Abstract: The Graph of Words Embedding consists in mapping every graph in a given dataset to a feature vector by counting unary and binary relations between node attributes of the graph. It has been shown to perform well for graphs with discrete label alphabets. In this paper we extend the methodology to graphs with n-dimensional continuous attributes by selecting node representatives. We propose three different discretization procedures for the attribute space and experimentally evaluate the dependence on both the selector and the number of node representatives. In the context of graph classification, the experimental results reveal that on two out of three public databases the proposed extension achieves superior performance over a standard reference system.

Abstract: This note introduces a visual attention model of text localization in real-world scenes. The core of the model built upon the proto-object concept is discussed. It is shown how such dynamic mid-level representation of the scene can be derived in the framework of an action-perception loop engaging salience, text information value computation, and eye guidance mechanisms.
Preliminary results that compare model generated scanpaths with those eye-tracked from human subjects are presented.

Abstract: In this paper we propose a segmentation-free approach to word spotting. Word images are first encoded into feature vectors using Fisher Vector. Then, these feature vectors are used together with pyramidal histogram of characters labels (PHOC) to learn SVM-based attribute models. Documents are represented by these PHOC based word attributes. To efficiently compute the word attributes over a sliding window, we propose to use an integral image representation of the document using a simplified version of the attribute model. Finally we re-rank the top word candidates using the more discriminative full version of the word attributes. We show state-of-the-art results for segmentation-free query-by-example word spotting in single-writer and multi-writer standard datasets.