Abstract: Graph representation of graphical documents often suffers from noise such as spurious nodes and edges, and their discontinuity. In general these errors occur during the low-level image processing viz. binarization, skeletonization, vectorization etc. Hierarchical graph representation is a nice and efficient way to solve this kind of problem by hierarchically merging node-node and node-edge depending on the distance. But the creation of hierarchical graph representing the graphical information often uses hard thresholds on the distance to create the hierarchical nodes (next state) of the lower nodes (or states) of a graph. As a result, the representation often loses useful information. This paper introduces plausibilities to the nodes of hierarchical graph as a function of distance and proposes a modified algorithm for matching subgraphs of the hierarchical graphs. The plausibility-annotated nodes help to improve the performance of the matching algorithm on two hierarchical structures. To show the potential of this approach, we conduct an experiment with the SESYD dataset.

Abstract: This paper is focused on the categorization of administrative document images (such as invoices) based on the recognition of the supplier’s graphical logo. Two different methods are proposed, the first one uses a bag-of-visual-words model whereas the second one tries to locate logo images described by the blurred shape model descriptor within documents by a sliding-window technique. Preliminar results are reported with a dataset of real administrative documents.

Abstract: In this paper we propose a segmentation-free approach to word spotting. Word images are first encoded into feature vectors using Fisher Vector. Then, these feature vectors are used together with pyramidal histogram of characters labels (PHOC) to learn SVM-based attribute models. Documents are represented by these PHOC based word attributes. To efficiently compute the word attributes over a sliding window, we propose to use an integral image representation of the document using a simplified version of the attribute model. Finally we re-rank the top word candidates using the more discriminative full version of the word attributes. We show state-of-the-art results for segmentation-free query-by-example word spotting in single-writer and multi-writer standard datasets.

Abstract: Nowadays, automatic identity document recognition, including passport and driving license recognition, is at the core of many applications within the administrative and service sectors, such as police, hospitality, car renting, etc. In former years, the document information was manually extracted whereas today this data is recognized automatically from images obtained by flat-bed scanners. Yet, since these scanners tend to be expensive and voluminous, companies in the sector have recently turned their attention to cheaper, small and yet computationally powerful scanners: the mobile devices. The document identity recognition from mobile images enclose several new difficulties w.r.t traditional scanned images, such as the loss of a controlled background, perspective, blurring, etc. In this paper we present a real application for identity document classification of images taken from mobile devices. This classification process is of extreme importance since a prior knowledge of the document type and origin strongly facilitates the subsequent information extraction. The proposed method is based on a traditional Bagof-Words in which we have taken into consideration several key aspects to enhance recognition rate. The method performance has been studied on three datasets containing more than 2000 images from 129 different document classes.

Abstract: Processing of handwritten documents is a task that is of wide interest for many
purposes, such as those related to preserve cultural heritage. Handwritten text recognition techniques have been successfully applied during the last decade to obtain transcriptions of handwritten documents, and keyword spotting techniques have been applied for searching specific terms in image collections of handwritten documents. However, results on transcription and indexing are far from perfect. In this framework, the use of new data sources arises as a new paradigm that will allow for a better transcription and indexing of handwritten documents. Three main different data sources could be considered: context of the document (style, writer, historical time, topics,. . . ), multimodal data (representations of the document in a different modality, such as the speech signal of the dictation of the text), and user feedback (corrections, amendments,. . . ). The CoMUN-HaT project aims at the integration of these different data sources into the transcription and indexing task for handwritten documents: the use of context derived from the analysis of the documents, how multimodality can aid the recognition process to obtain more accurate transcriptions (including transcription in a modern version of the language), and integration into a userin-the-loop assisted text transcription framework. This will be reflected in the construction of a transcription and indexing platform that can be used by both professional and nonprofessional users, contributing to crowd-sourcing activities to preserve cultural heritage and to obtain an accessible version of the involved corpus.