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: Tabular structures in business documents offer a complementary dimension to the raw textual data. For instance, there is information about the relationships among pieces of information. Nowadays, digital mailroom applications have become a key service for workflow automation. Therefore, the detection and interpretation of tables is crucial. With the recent advances in information extraction, table detection and recognition has gained interest in document image analysis, in particular, with the absence of rule lines and unknown information about rows and columns. However, business documents usually contain sensitive contents limiting the amount of public benchmarking datasets. In this paper, we propose a graph-based approach for detecting tables in document images which do not require the raw content of the document. Hence, the sensitive content can be previously removed and, instead of using the raw image or textual content, we propose a purely structural approach to keep sensitive data anonymous. Our framework uses graph neural networks (GNNs) to describe the local repetitive structures that constitute a table. In particular, our main application domain are business documents. We have carefully validated our approach in two invoice datasets and a modern document benchmark. Our experiments demonstrate that tables can be detected by purely structural approaches.

Abstract: In the last years, the interest in Optical Music Recognition (OMR) has reawakened, especially since the appearance of deep learning. However, there are very few works addressing handwritten scores. In this work we describe a full OMR pipeline for handwritten music scores by using Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks that could serve as a baseline for the research community.

Abstract: In this article, a form of the so-called word spotting-method is used on a large set of handwritten documents in order to identify those that contain script of similar execution. The point of departure for the investigation is the mediaeval Swedish manuscript Cod. Holm. D 3. The main scribe of this manuscript has yet not been identified in other documents. The current attempt aims at localising other documents that display a large degree of similarity in the characteristics of the script, these being possible candidates for being executed by the same hand. For this purpose, the method of word spotting has been employed, focusing on individual letters, and therefore the process is referred to as letter spotting in the article. In this process, a set of ‘g’:s, ‘h’:s and ‘k’:s have been selected as templates, and then a search has been made for close matches among the mediaeval Swedish charters. The search resulted in a number of charters that displayed great similarities with the manuscript D 3. The used letter spotting method thus proofed to be a very efficient sorting tool localising similar script samples.

Abstract: We successfully combine Expectation-Maximization algorithm and variational
approaches for parameter learning and computing inference on Markov random fields. This is a general method that can be applied to many computer
vision tasks. In this paper, we apply it to handwritten text line segmentation.
We conduct several experiments that demonstrate that our method deal with
common issues of this task, such as complex document layout or non-latin
scripts. The obtained results prove that our method achieve state-of-theart performance on different benchmark datasets without any particular fine
tuning step.