Abstract: State-of-the-art handwriting recognition systems are learning-based systems that require large sets of training data. The creation of training data, and consequently the creation of a well-performing recognition system, requires therefore a substantial amount of human work. This can be reduced with semi-supervised learning, which uses unlabeled text lines for training as well. Current approaches estimate the correct transcription of the unlabeled data via handwriting recognition which is not only extremely demanding as far as computational costs are concerned but also requires a good model of the target language. In this paper, we propose a different approach that makes use of keyword spotting, which is significantly faster and does not need any language model. In a set of experiments we demonstrate its superiority over existing approaches.

Abstract: With the ongoing progress in digitization, huge document collections and archives have become available to a broad audience. Scanned document images can be transmitted electronically and studied simultaneously throughout the world. While this is very beneficial, it is often impossible to perform automated searches on these document collections. Optical character recognition usually fails when it comes to handwritten or historic documents. In order to address the need for exploring document collections rapidly, researchers are working on word spotting. In query-by-example word spotting scenarios, the user selects an exemplary occurrence of the query word in a document image. The word spotting system then retrieves all regions in the collection that are visually similar to the given example of the query word. The best matching regions are presented to the user and no actual transcription is required.
An important property of a word spotting system is the computational speed with which queries can be executed. In our previous work, we presented a relatively slow but high-precision method. In the present work, we will extend this baseline system to an integrated two-stage approach. In a coarse-grained first stage, we will filter document images efficiently in order to identify regions that are likely to contain the query word. In the fine-grained second stage, these regions will be analyzed with our previously presented high-precision method. Finally, we will report recognition results and query times for the well-known George Washington
benchmark in our evaluation. We achieve state-of-the-art recognition results while the query times can be reduced to 50% in comparison with our baseline.

Abstract: Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a few-shot learning-based handwriting recognition approach that significantly reduces the human annotation process, by requiring only a few images of each alphabet symbols. The method consists of detecting all the symbols of a given alphabet in a textline image and decoding the obtained similarity scores to the final sequence of transcribed symbols. Our model is first pretrained on synthetic line images generated from an alphabet, which could differ from the alphabet of the target domain. A second training step is then applied to reduce the gap between the source and the target data. Since this retraining would require annotation of thousands of handwritten symbols together with their bounding boxes, we propose to avoid such human effort through an unsupervised progressive learning approach that automatically assigns pseudo-labels to the unlabeled data. The evaluation on different datasets shows that our model can lead to competitive results with a significant reduction in human effort. The code will be publicly available in the following repository: https://github.com/dali92002/HTRbyMatching

Abstract: During the last years, there has been an increasing interest in applying the multiple classifier framework to the domain of structural pattern recognition. Constructing base classifiers when the input patterns are graph based representations is not an easy problem. In this work, we make use of the graph embedding methodology in order to construct different feature vector representations for graphs. The graph of words embedding assigns a feature vector to every graph by counting unary and binary relations between node representatives and combining these pieces of information into a single vector. Selecting different node representatives leads to different vectorial representations and therefore to different base classifiers that can be combined. We experimentally show how this methodology significantly improves the classification of graphs with respect to single base classifiers.