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.

Abstract: The analysis and recognition of music scores has attracted the interest of researchers for decades. Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is a classical research field of Document Image Analysis and Recognition (DIAR), whose aim is to extract information from music scores. Music scores contain both graphical and textual information, and for this reason, techniques are closely related to graphics recognition and text recognition. Since music scores use a particular diagrammatic notation that follow the rules of music theory, many approaches make use of context information to guide the recognition and solve ambiguities. This chapter overviews the main Optical Music Recognition (OMR) approaches. Firstly, the different methods are grouped according to the OMR stages, namely, staff removal, music symbol recognition, and syntactical analysis. Secondly, specific approaches for old and handwritten music scores are reviewed. Finally, online approaches and commercial systems are also commented.

Abstract: This thesis addresses the problem of automatic scene text understanding in unconstrained conditions. In particular, we tackle the tasks of multi-language and arbitrary-oriented text detection, tracking, and script identification in natural scenes.
For this we have developed a set of generic methods that build on top of the basic observation that text has always certain key visual and structural characteristics that are independent of the language or script in which it is written. Text instances in any
language or script are always formed as groups of similar atomic parts, being them either individual characters, small stroke parts, or even whole words in the case of cursive text. This holistic (sumof-parts) and recursive perspective has lead us to explore different variants of the “segmentation and grouping” paradigm of computer vision.
Scene text detection methodologies are usually based in classification of individual regions or patches, using a priory knowledge for a given script or language. Human perception of text, on the other hand, is based on perceptual organization through which
text emerges as a perceptually significant group of atomic objects.
In this thesis, we argue that the text detection problem must be posed as the detection of meaningful groups of regions. We address the problem of text detection in natural scenes from a hierarchical perspective, making explicit use of the recursive nature of text, aiming directly to the detection of region groupings corresponding to text within a hierarchy produced by an agglomerative similarity clustering process over individual regions. We propose an optimal way to construct such an hierarchy introducing a feature space designed to produce text group hypothese with high recall and a novel stopping rule combining a discriminative classifier and a probabilistic measure of group meaningfulness based in perceptual organization. Within this generic framework, we design a text-specific object proposals algorithm that, contrary to existing generic object proposals methods, aims directly to the detection of text regions groupings. For this, we abandon the rigid definition of “what is text” of traditional specialized text detectors, and move towards more fuzzy perspective of grouping-based object proposals methods.
Then, we present a hybrid algorithm for detection and tracking of scene text where the notion of region groupings plays also a central role. By leveraging the structural arrangement of text group components between consecutive frames we can improve
the overall tracking performance of the system.
Finally, since our generic detection framework is inherently designed for multi-language environments, we focus on the problem of script identification in order to build a multi-language end-toend reading system. Facing this problem with state of the art CNN classifiers is not straightforward, as they fail to address a key
characteristic of scene text instances: their extremely variable aspect ratio. Instead of resizing input images to a fixed size as in the typical use of holistic CNN classifiers, we propose a patch-based classification framework in order to preserve discriminative parts of the image that are characteristic of its class. We describe a novel method based on the use of ensembles of conjoined networks to jointly learn discriminative stroke-parts representations and their relative importance in a patch-based classification scheme.

Abstract: Searching for text objects in real scene images is an open problem and a very active computer vision research area. A large number of methods have been proposed tackling the text search as extension of the ones from the document analysis field or inspired by general purpose object detection methods. However the general problem of object search in real scene images remains an extremely challenging problem due to the huge variability in object appearance. This thesis builds on top of the most recent findings in the visual attention literature presenting a novel computational model of eye guidance aiming to better describe text object search in real scene images.
First are presented the relevant state-of-the-art results from the visual attention literature regarding eye movements and visual search. Relevant models of attention are discussed and integrated with recent observations on the role of top-down constraints and the emerging need for a layered model of attention in which saliency is not the only factor guiding attention. Visual attention is then explained by the interaction of several modulating factors, such as objects, value, plans and saliency. Then we introduce our probabilistic formulation of attention deployment in real scene. The model is based on the rationale that oculomotor control depends on two interacting but distinct processes: an attentional process that assigns value to the sources of information and motor process that flexibly links information with action.
In such framework, the choice of where to look next is task-dependent and oriented to classes of objects embedded within pictures of complex scenes. The dependence on task is taken into account by exploiting the value and the reward of gazing at certain image patches or proto-objects that provide a sparse representation of the scene objects.
In the experimental section the model is tested in laboratory condition, comparing model simulations with data from eye tracking experiments. The comparison is qualitative in terms of observable scan paths and quantitative in terms of statistical similarity of gaze shift amplitude. Experiments are performed using eye tracking data from both a publicly available dataset of face and text and from newly performed eye-tracking experiments on a dataset of street view pictures containing text. The last part of this thesis is dedicated to study the extent to which the proposed model can account for human eye movements in a low constrained setting. We used a mobile eye tracking device and an ad-hoc developed methodology to compare model simulated eye data with the human eye data from mobile eye tracking recordings. Such setting allow to test the model in an incomplete visual information condition, reproducing a close to real-life search task.

Abstract: Until recently, most computer vision models remained illiterate, largely ignoring the semantically rich and explicit information contained in scene text. Recent progress in scene text detection and recognition has recently allowed exploring its role in a diverse set of open computer vision problems, e.g. image classification, image-text retrieval, image captioning, and visual question answering to name a few. The explicit semantics of scene text closely requires specific modeling similar to language. However, scene text is a particular signal that has to be interpreted according to a comprehensive perspective that encapsulates all the visual cues in an image. Incorporating this information is a straightforward task for humans, but if we are unfamiliar with a language or scripture, achieving a complete world understanding is impossible (e.a. visiting a foreign country with a different alphabet). Despite the importance of scene text, modeling it requires considering the several ways in which scene text interacts with an image, processing and fusing an additional modality. In this thesis, we mainly focus
on two tasks, scene text-based fine-grained image classification, and cross-modal retrieval. In both studied tasks we identify existing limitations in current approaches and propose plausible solutions. Concretely, in each chapter: i) We define a compact way to embed scene text that generalizes to unseen words at training time while performing in real-time. ii) We incorporate the previously learned scene text embedding to create an image-level descriptor that overcomes optical character recognition (OCR) errors which is well-suited to the fine-grained image classification task. iii) We design a region-level reasoning network that learns the interaction through semantics among salient visual regions and scene text instances. iv) We employ scene text information in image-text matching and introduce the Scene Text Aware Cross-Modal retrieval StacMR task. We gather a dataset that incorporates scene text and design a model suited for the newly studied modality. v) We identify the drawbacks of current retrieval metrics in cross-modal retrieval. An image captioning metric is proposed as a way of better evaluating semantics in retrieved results. Ample experimentation shows that incorporating such semantics into a model yields better semantic results while
requiring significantly less data to converge.