Abstract: Historical ciphered manuscripts are a type of document where graphical symbols are used to encrypt their content instead of regular text. Nowadays, expert transcriptions can be found in libraries alongside the corresponding manuscript images. However, those transcriptions are not aligned, so these are barely usable for training deep learning-based recognition methods. To solve this issue, we propose a method to align each symbol in the transcript of an image with its visual representation by using an attention-based Sequence to Sequence (Seq2Seq) model. The core idea is that, by learning to recognise symbols sequence within a cipher line image, the model also identifies their position implicitly through an attention mechanism. Thus, the resulting symbol segmentation can be later used for training algorithms. The experimental evaluation shows that this method is promising, especially taking into account the small size of the cipher dataset.

Abstract: This work addresses the problem of Question Answering (QA) on handwritten document collections. Unlike typical QA and Visual Question Answering (VQA) formulations where the answer is a short text, we aim to locate a document snippet where the answer lies. The proposed approach works without recognizing the text in the documents. We argue that the recognition-free approach is suitable for handwritten documents and historical collections where robust text recognition is often difficult. At the same time, for human users, document image snippets containing answers act as a valid alternative to textual answers. The proposed approach uses an off-the-shelf deep embedding network which can project both textual words and word images into a common sub-space. This embedding bridges the textual and visual domains and helps us retrieve document snippets that potentially answer a question. We evaluate results of the proposed approach on two new datasets: (i) HW-SQuAD: a synthetic, handwritten document image counterpart of SQuAD1.0 dataset and (ii) BenthamQA: a smaller set of QA pairs defined on documents from the popular Bentham manuscripts collection. We also present a thorough analysis of the proposed recognition-free approach compared to a recognition-based approach which uses text recognized from the images using an OCR. Datasets presented in this work are available to download at docvqa.org.

Abstract: In this report we present results of the ICDAR 2021 edition of the Document Visual Question Challenges. This edition complements the previous tasks on Single Document VQA and Document Collection VQA with a newly introduced on Infographics VQA. Infographics VQA is based on a new dataset of more than 5, 000 infographics images and 30, 000 question-answer pairs. The winner methods have scored 0.6120 ANLS in Infographics VQA task, 0.7743 ANLSL in Document Collection VQA task and 0.8705 ANLS in Single Document VQA. We present a summary of the datasets used for each task, description of each of the submitted methods and the results and analysis of their performance. A summary of the progress made on Single Document VQA since the first edition of the DocVQA 2020 challenge is also presented.

Abstract: Explaining an image with missing or non-existent objects is known as object bias (hallucination) in image captioning. This behaviour is quite common in the state-of-the-art captioning models which is not desirable by humans. To decrease the object hallucination in captioning, we propose three simple yet efficient training augmentation method for sentences which requires no new training data or increase
in the model size. By extensive analysis, we show that the proposed methods can significantly diminish our models’ object bias on hallucination metrics. Moreover, we experimentally demonstrate that our methods decrease the dependency on the visual features. All of our code, configuration files and model weights are available online.

Abstract: This work investigates the problem of sketch-guided object localization (SGOL), where human sketches are used as queries to conduct the object localization in natural images. In this cross-modal setting, we first contribute with a tough-to-beat baseline that without any specific SGOL training is able to outperform the previous works on a fixed set of classes. The baseline is useful to analyze the performance of SGOL approaches based on available simple yet powerful methods. We advance prior arts by proposing a sketch-conditioned DETR (DEtection TRansformer) architecture which avoids a hard classification and alleviates the domain gap between sketches and images to localize object instances. Although the main goal of SGOL is focused on object detection, we explored its natural extension to sketch-guided instance segmentation. This novel task allows to move towards identifying the objects at pixel level, which is of key importance in several applications. We experimentally demonstrate that our model and its variants significantly advance over previous state-of-the-art results. All training and testing code of our model will be released to facilitate future researchhttps://github.com/priba/sgol_wild.