Abstract: Facing high error rates and slow recognition speed for full text transcription of unconstrained handwriting images, keyword spotting is a promising alternative to locate specific search terms within scanned document images. We have previously proposed a learning-based method for keyword spotting using character hidden Markov models that showed a high performance when compared with traditional template image matching. In the lexicon-free approach pursued, only the text appearance was taken into account for recognition. In this paper, we integrate character n-gram language models into the spotting system in order to provide an additional language context. On the modern IAM database as well as the historical George Washington database, we demonstrate that character language models significantly improve the spotting performance.

Abstract: Historical documents suffer from different types of degradation and noise such as background variation, uneven illumination or dark spots. In case of double-sided documents, another common problem is that the back side of the document usually interferes with the front side because of the transparency of the document or ink bleeding. This effect is called the show through phenomenon. Many methods are developed to solve these problems, and in the case of show-through, by scanning and matching both the front and back sides of the document. In contrast, our approach is designed to use only one side of the scanned document. We hypothesize that show-trough are low contrast components, while foreground components are high contrast ones. A Multiresolution Contrast (MC) decomposition is presented in order to estimate the contrast of features at different spatial scales. We cancel the show-through phenomenon by thresholding these low contrast components. This decomposition is also able to enhance the image removing shadowed areas by weighting spatial scales. Results show that the enhanced images improve the readability of the documents, allowing scholars both to recover unreadable words and to solve ambiguities.

Abstract: In some Thai documents, a single text line of a printed document page may contain words of both Thai and Roman scripts. For the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of such a document page it is better to identify, at first, Thai and Roman script portions and then to use individual OCR systems of the respective scripts on these identified portions. In this article, an SVM-based method is proposed for identification of word-wise printed Roman and Thai scripts from a single line of a document page. Here, at first, the document is segmented into lines and then lines are segmented into character groups (words). In the proposed scheme, we identify the script of a character group combining different character features obtained from structural shape, profile behavior, component overlapping information, topological properties, and water reservoir concept, etc. Based on the experiment on 10,000 data (words) we obtained 99.62% script identification accuracy from the proposed scheme.

Abstract: 5Y Impact Factor: 1.14 / 3rd (Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence)
We introduce a model of attentional eye guidance based on the rationale that the deployment of gaze is to be considered in the context of a general action-perception loop relying on two strictly intertwined processes: sensory processing, depending on current gaze position, identifies sources of information that are most valuable under the given task; motor processing links such information with the oculomotor act by sampling the next gaze position and thus performing the gaze shift. In such a 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 payoff of gazing at certain image patches or proto-objects that provide a sparse representation of the scene objects. The different levels of the action-perception loop are represented in probabilistic form and eventually give rise to a stochastic process that generates the gaze sequence. This way the model also accounts for statistical properties of gaze shifts such as individual scan path variability. Results of the simulations are compared either with experimental data derived from publicly available datasets and from our own experiments.

Abstract: In this paper we evaluate the influence of the selection of key points and the associated features in the performance of word spotting processes. In general, features can be extracted from a number of characteristic points like corners, contours, skeletons, maxima, minima, crossings, etc. A number of descriptors exist in the literature using different interest point detectors. But the intrinsic variability of handwriting vary strongly on the performance if the interest points are not stable enough. In this paper, we analyze the performance of different descriptors for local interest points. As benchmarking dataset we have used the Barcelona Marriage Database that contains handwritten records of marriages over five centuries.