Abstract: During the last decades, the performance of optical music recognition has been increasingly improving. However, and despite the 2-dimensional nature of music notation (e.g. notes have rhythm and pitch), most works treat musical scores as a sequence of symbols in one dimension, which make their recognition still a challenge. Thus, in this work we explore the use of graph neural networks for musical score recognition. First, because graphs are suited for n-dimensional representations, and second, because the combination of graphs with deep learning has shown a great performance in similar applications. Our methodology consists of: First, we will detect each isolated/atomic symbols (those that can not be decomposed in more graphical primitives) and the primitives that form a musical symbol. Then, we will build the graph taking as root node the notehead and as leaves those primitives or symbols that modify the note’s rhythm (stem, beam, flag) or pitch (flat, sharp, natural). Finally, the graph is translated into a human-readable character sequence for a final transcription and evaluation. Our method has been tested on more than five thousand measures, showing promising results.

Abstract: The transcription of sheet music into some machine-readable format can be carried out manually. However, the complexity of music notation inevitably leads to burdensome software for music score editing, which makes the whole process
very time-consuming and prone to errors. Consequently, automatic transcription
systems for musical documents represent interesting tools.
Document analysis is the subject that deals with the extraction and processing
of documents through image and pattern recognition. It is a branch of computer
vision. Taking music scores as source, the field devoted to address this task is
known as Optical Music Recognition (OMR). Typically, an OMR system takes an
image of a music score and automatically extracts its content into some symbolic
structure such as MEI or MusicXML.
In this dissertation, we have investigated different methods for recognizing a
single staff section (e.g. scores for violin, flute, etc.), much in the same way as most text recognition research focuses on recognizing words appearing in a given line image. These methods are based in two different methodologies. On the one hand, we present two methods based on Recurrent Neural Networks, in particular, the
Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network. On the other hand, a method based on Sequence to Sequence models is detailed.
Music context is needed to improve the OMR results, just like language models
and dictionaries help in handwriting recognition. For example, syntactical rules
and grammars could be easily defined to cope with the ambiguities in the rhythm.
In music theory, for example, the time signature defines the amount of beats per
bar unit. Thus, in the second part of this dissertation, different methodologies
have been investigated to improve the OMR recognition. We have explored three
different methods: (a) a graphic tree-structure representation, Dendrograms, that
joins, at each level, its primitives following a set of rules, (b) the incorporation of Language Models to model the probability of a sequence of tokens, and (c) graph neural networks to analyze the music scores to avoid meaningless relationships between music primitives.
Finally, to train all these methodologies, and given the method-specificity of
the datasets in the literature, we have created four different music datasets. Two of them are synthetic with a modern or old handwritten appearance, whereas the
other two are real handwritten scores, being one of them modern and the other
old.

Abstract: Until recently, most computer vision models remained illiterate, largely ignoring the semantically rich and explicit information contained in scene text. Recent progress in scene text detection and recognition has recently allowed exploring its role in a diverse set of open computer vision problems, e.g. image classification, image-text retrieval, image captioning, and visual question answering to name a few. The explicit semantics of scene text closely requires specific modeling similar to language. However, scene text is a particular signal that has to be interpreted according to a comprehensive perspective that encapsulates all the visual cues in an image. Incorporating this information is a straightforward task for humans, but if we are unfamiliar with a language or scripture, achieving a complete world understanding is impossible (e.a. visiting a foreign country with a different alphabet). Despite the importance of scene text, modeling it requires considering the several ways in which scene text interacts with an image, processing and fusing an additional modality. In this thesis, we mainly focus
on two tasks, scene text-based fine-grained image classification, and cross-modal retrieval. In both studied tasks we identify existing limitations in current approaches and propose plausible solutions. Concretely, in each chapter: i) We define a compact way to embed scene text that generalizes to unseen words at training time while performing in real-time. ii) We incorporate the previously learned scene text embedding to create an image-level descriptor that overcomes optical character recognition (OCR) errors which is well-suited to the fine-grained image classification task. iii) We design a region-level reasoning network that learns the interaction through semantics among salient visual regions and scene text instances. iv) We employ scene text information in image-text matching and introduce the Scene Text Aware Cross-Modal retrieval StacMR task. We gather a dataset that incorporates scene text and design a model suited for the newly studied modality. v) We identify the drawbacks of current retrieval metrics in cross-modal retrieval. An image captioning metric is proposed as a way of better evaluating semantics in retrieved results. Ample experimentation shows that incorporating such semantics into a model yields better semantic results while
requiring significantly less data to converge.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a framework for Multilingual Scene Text Visual Question Answering that deals with new languages in a zero-shot fashion. Specifically, we consider the task of Scene Text Visual Question Answering (STVQA) in which the question can be asked in different languages and it is not necessarily aligned to the scene text language. Thus, we first introduce a natural step towards a more generalized version of STVQA: MUST-VQA. Accounting for this, we discuss two evaluation scenarios in the constrained setting, namely IID and zero-shot and we demonstrate that the models can perform on a par on a zero-shot setting. We further provide extensive experimentation and show the effectiveness of adapting multilingual language models into STVQA tasks.

Abstract: Visual data obtained during driving scenarios usually contain large amounts of text that conveys semantic information necessary to analyse the urban environment and is integral to the traffic control plan. Yet, research on autonomous driving or driver assistance systems typically ignores this information. To advance research in this direction, we present RoadText-3K, a large driving video dataset with fully annotated text. RoadText-3K is three times bigger than its predecessor and contains data from varied geographical locations, unconstrained driving conditions and multiple languages and scripts. We offer a comprehensive analysis of tracking by detection and detection by tracking methods exploring the limits of state-of-the-art text detection. Finally, we propose a new end-to-end trainable tracking model that yields state-of-the-art results on this challenging dataset. Our experiments demonstrate the complexity and variability of RoadText-3K and establish a new, realistic benchmark for scene text tracking in the wild.