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Alicia Fornes, Josep Llados, Gemma Sanchez and Dimosthenis Karatzas. 2010. Rotation Invariant Hand-Drawn Symbol Recognition based on a Dynamic Time Warping Model. IJDAR, 13(3), 229–241.
Abstract: One of the major difficulties of handwriting symbol recognition is the high variability among symbols because of the different writer styles. In this paper, we introduce a robust approach for describing and recognizing hand-drawn symbols tolerant to these writer style differences. This method, which is invariant to scale and rotation, is based on the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm. The symbols are described by vector sequences, a variation of the DTW distance is used for computing the matching distance, and K-Nearest Neighbor is used to classify them. Our approach has been evaluated in two benchmarking scenarios consisting of hand-drawn symbols. Compared with state-of-the-art methods for symbol recognition, our method shows higher tolerance to the irregular deformations induced by hand-drawn strokes.
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Hongxing Gao and 6 others. 2013. Key-region detection for document images -applications to administrative document retrieval. 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.230–234.
Abstract: In this paper we argue that a key-region detector designed to take into account the special characteristics of document images can result in the detection of less and more meaningful key-regions. We propose a fast key-region detector able to capture aspects of the structural information of the document, and demonstrate its efficiency by comparing against standard detectors in an administrative document retrieval scenario. We show that using the proposed detector results to a smaller number of detected key-regions and higher performance without any drop in speed compared to standard state of the art detectors.
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P. Wang, V. Eglin, C. Garcia, C. Largeron, Josep Llados and Alicia Fornes. 2014. Représentation par graphe de mots manuscrits dans les images pour la recherche par similarité. Colloque International Francophone sur l'Écrit et le Document.233–248.
Abstract: Effective information retrieval on handwritten document images has always been
a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel handwritten word spotting approach based on graph representation. The presented model comprises both topological and morphological signatures of handwriting. Skeleton-based graphs with the Shape Context labeled vertexes are established for connected components. Each word image is represented as a sequence of graphs. In order to be robust to the handwriting variations, an exhaustive merging process based on DTW alignment results introduced in the similarity measure between word images. With respect to the computation complexity, an approximate graph edit distance approach using bipartite matching is employed for graph matching. The experiments on the George Washington dataset and the marriage records from the Barcelona Cathedral dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art structural methods.
Keywords: word spotting; graph-based representation; shape context description; graph edit distance; DTW; block merging; query by example
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Minesh Mathew, Lluis Gomez, Dimosthenis Karatzas and C.V. Jawahar. 2021. Asking questions on handwritten document collections. IJDAR, 24, 235–249.
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.
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Ernest Valveny and Enric Marti. 2000. Hand-drawn symbol recognition in graphic documents using deformable template matching and a Bayesian framework. Proc. 15th Int Pattern Recognition Conf.239–242.
Abstract: Hand-drawn symbols can take many different and distorted shapes from their ideal representation. Then, very flexible methods are needed to be able to handle unconstrained drawings. We propose here to extend our previous work in hand-drawn symbol recognition based on a Bayesian framework and deformable template matching. This approach gets flexibility enough to fit distorted shapes in the drawing while keeping fidelity to the ideal shape of the symbol. In this work, we define the similarity measure between an image and a symbol based on the distance from every pixel in the image to the lines in the symbol. Matching is carried out using an implementation of the EM algorithm. Thus, we can improve recognition rates and computation time with respect to our previous formulation based on a simulated annealing algorithm.
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Partha Pratim Roy, Umapada Pal and Josep Llados. 2008. Morphology Based Handwritten Line Segmentation using Foreground and Background Information. International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition,.241–246.
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Dimosthenis Karatzas, Sergi Robles and Lluis Gomez. 2014. An on-line platform for ground truthing and performance evaluation of text extraction systems. 11th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis and Systems.242–246.
Abstract: This paper presents a set of on-line software tools for creating ground truth and calculating performance evaluation metrics for text extraction tasks such as localization, segmentation and recognition. The platform supports the definition of comprehensive ground truth information at different text representation levels while it offers centralised management and quality control of the ground truthing effort. It implements a range of state of the art performance evaluation algorithms and offers functionality for the definition of evaluation scenarios, on-line calculation of various performance metrics and visualisation of the results. The
presented platform, which comprises the backbone of the ICDAR 2011 (challenge 1) and 2013 (challenges 1 and 2) Robust Reading competitions, is now made available for public use.
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Lluis Gomez and 6 others. 2021. Multimodal grid features and cell pointers for scene text visual question answering. PRL, 150, 242–249.
Abstract: This paper presents a new model for the task of scene text visual question answering. In this task questions about a given image can only be answered by reading and understanding scene text. Current state of the art models for this task make use of a dual attention mechanism in which one attention module attends to visual features while the other attends to textual features. A possible issue with this is that it makes difficult for the model to reason jointly about both modalities. To fix this problem we propose a new model that is based on an single attention mechanism that attends to multi-modal features conditioned to the question. The output weights of this attention module over a grid of multi-modal spatial features are interpreted as the probability that a certain spatial location of the image contains the answer text to the given question. Our experiments demonstrate competitive performance in two standard datasets with a model that is faster than previous methods at inference time. Furthermore, we also provide a novel analysis of the ST-VQA dataset based on a human performance study. Supplementary material, code, and data is made available through this link.
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Muhammad Muzzamil Luqman, Jean-Yves Ramel and Josep Llados. 2012. Improving Fuzzy Multilevel Graph Embedding through Feature Selection Technique. Structural, Syntactic, and Statistical Pattern Recognition, Joint IAPR International Workshop. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 243–253. (LNCS.)
Abstract: Graphs are the most powerful, expressive and convenient data structures but there is a lack of efficient computational tools and algorithms for processing them. The embedding of graphs into numeric vector spaces permits them to access the state-of-the-art computational efficient statistical models and tools. In this paper we take forward our work on explicit graph embedding and present an improvement to our earlier proposed method, named “fuzzy multilevel graph embedding – FMGE”, through feature selection technique. FMGE achieves the embedding of attributed graphs into low dimensional vector spaces by performing a multilevel analysis of graphs and extracting a set of global, structural and elementary level features. Feature selection permits FMGE to select the subset of most discriminating features and to discard the confusing ones for underlying graph dataset. Experimental results for graph classification experimentation on IAM letter, GREC and fingerprint graph databases, show improvement in the performance of FMGE.
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Alicia Fornes, Josep Llados, Gemma Sanchez, Xavier Otazu and Horst Bunke. 2010. A Combination of Features for Symbol-Independent Writer Identification in Old Music Scores. IJDAR, 13(4), 243–259.
Abstract: The aim of writer identification is determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of writers. In this paper, we present an architecture for writer identification in old handwritten music scores. Even though an important amount of music compositions contain handwritten text, the aim of our work is to use only music notation to determine the author. The main contribution is therefore the use of features extracted from graphical alphabets. Our proposal consists in combining the identification results of two different approaches, based on line and textural features. The steps of the ensemble architecture are the following. First of all, the music sheet is preprocessed for removing the staff lines. Then, music lines and texture images are generated for computing line features and textural features. Finally, the classification results are combined for identifying the writer. The proposed method has been tested on a database of old music scores from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, achieving a recognition rate of about 92% with 20 writers.
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