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Juan Ignacio Toledo, Manuel Carbonell, Alicia Fornes and Josep Llados. 2019. Information Extraction from Historical Handwritten Document Images with a Context-aware Neural Model. PR, 86, 27–36.
Abstract: Many historical manuscripts that hold trustworthy memories of the past societies contain information organized in a structured layout (e.g. census, birth or marriage records). The precious information stored in these documents cannot be effectively used nor accessed without costly annotation efforts. The transcription driven by the semantic categories of words is crucial for the subsequent access. In this paper we describe an approach to extract information from structured historical handwritten text images and build a knowledge representation for the extraction of meaning out of historical data. The method extracts information, such as named entities, without the need of an intermediate transcription step, thanks to the incorporation of context information through language models. Our system has two variants, the first one is based on bigrams, whereas the second one is based on recurrent neural networks. Concretely, our second architecture integrates a Convolutional Neural Network to model visual information from word images together with a Bidirecitonal Long Short Term Memory network to model the relation among the words. This integrated sequential approach is able to extract more information than just the semantic category (e.g. a semantic category can be associated to a person in a record). Our system is generic, it deals with out-of-vocabulary words by design, and it can be applied to structured handwritten texts from different domains. The method has been validated with the ICDAR IEHHR competition protocol, outperforming the existing approaches.
Keywords: Document image analysis; Handwritten documents; Named entity recognition; Deep neural networks
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Lei Kang, Juan Ignacio Toledo, Pau Riba, Mauricio Villegas, Alicia Fornes and Marçal Rusiñol. 2018. Convolve, Attend and Spell: An Attention-based Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Handwritten Word Recognition. 40th German Conference on Pattern Recognition.459–472.
Abstract: This paper proposes Convolve, Attend and Spell, an attention based sequence-to-sequence model for handwritten word recognition. The proposed architecture has three main parts: an encoder, consisting of a CNN and a bi-directional GRU, an attention mechanism devoted to focus on the pertinent features and a decoder formed by a one-directional GRU, able to spell the corresponding word, character by character. Compared with the recent state-of-the-art, our model achieves competitive results on the IAM dataset without needing any pre-processing step, predefined lexicon nor language model. Code and additional results are available in https://github.com/omni-us/research-seq2seq-HTR.
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Pau Riba, Andreas Fischer, Josep Llados and Alicia Fornes. 2018. Learning Graph Distances with Message Passing Neural Networks. 24th International Conference on Pattern Recognition.2239–2244.
Abstract: Graph representations have been widely used in pattern recognition thanks to their powerful representation formalism and rich theoretical background. A number of error-tolerant graph matching algorithms such as graph edit distance have been proposed for computing a distance between two labelled graphs. However, they typically suffer from a high
computational complexity, which makes it difficult to apply
these matching algorithms in a real scenario. In this paper, we propose an efficient graph distance based on the emerging field of geometric deep learning. Our method employs a message passing neural network to capture the graph structure and learns a metric with a siamese network approach. The performance of the proposed graph distance is validated in two application cases, graph classification and graph retrieval of handwritten words, and shows a promising performance when compared with
(approximate) graph edit distance benchmarks.
Keywords: ★Best Paper Award★
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Jialuo Chen, Pau Riba, Alicia Fornes, Juan Mas, Josep Llados and Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora. 2018. Word-Hunter: A Gamesourcing Experience to Validate the Transcription of Historical Manuscripts. 16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition.528–533.
Abstract: Nowadays, there are still many handwritten historical documents in archives waiting to be transcribed and indexed. Since manual transcription is tedious and time consuming, the automatic transcription seems the path to follow. However, the performance of current handwriting recognition techniques is not perfect, so a manual validation is mandatory. Crowdsourcing is a good strategy for manual validation, however it is a tedious task. In this paper we analyze experiences based in gamification
in order to propose and design a gamesourcing framework that increases the interest of users. Then, we describe and analyze our experience when validating the automatic transcription using the gamesourcing application. Moreover, thanks to the combination of clustering and handwriting recognition techniques, we can speed up the validation while maintaining the performance.
Keywords: Crowdsourcing; Gamification; Handwritten documents; Performance evaluation
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Manuel Carbonell, Mauricio Villegas, Alicia Fornes and Josep Llados. 2018. Joint Recognition of Handwritten Text and Named Entities with a Neural End-to-end Model. 13th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems.399–404.
Abstract: When extracting information from handwritten documents, text transcription and named entity recognition are usually faced as separate subsequent tasks. This has the disadvantage that errors in the first module affect heavily the
performance of the second module. In this work we propose to do both tasks jointly, using a single neural network with a common architecture used for plain text recognition. Experimentally, the work has been tested on a collection of historical marriage records. Results of experiments are presented to show the effect on the performance for different
configurations: different ways of encoding the information, doing or not transfer learning and processing at text line or multi-line region level. The results are comparable to state of the art reported in the ICDAR 2017 Information Extraction competition, even though the proposed technique does not use any dictionaries, language modeling or post processing.
Keywords: Named entity recognition; Handwritten Text Recognition; neural networks
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Alicia Fornes and Bart Lamiroy. 2018. Graphics Recognition, Current Trends and Evolutions. Springer International Publishing. (LNCS.)
Abstract: This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Graphics Recognition, GREC 2017, held in Kyoto, Japan, in November 2017.
The 10 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 14 initial submissions. They contain both classical and emerging topics of graphics rcognition, namely analysis and detection of diagrams, search and classification, optical music recognition, interpretation of engineering drawings and maps.
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Katerine Diaz, Jesus Martinez del Rincon, Marçal Rusiñol and Aura Hernandez-Sabate. 2019. Feature Extraction by Using Dual-Generalized Discriminative Common Vectors. JMIV, 61(3), 331–351.
Abstract: In this paper, a dual online subspace-based learning method called dual-generalized discriminative common vectors (Dual-GDCV) is presented. The method extends incremental GDCV by exploiting simultaneously both the concepts of incremental and decremental learning for supervised feature extraction and classification. Our methodology is able to update the feature representation space without recalculating the full projection or accessing the previously processed training data. It allows both adding information and removing unnecessary data from a knowledge base in an efficient way, while retaining the previously acquired knowledge. The proposed method has been theoretically proved and empirically validated in six standard face recognition and classification datasets, under two scenarios: (1) removing and adding samples of existent classes, and (2) removing and adding new classes to a classification problem. Results show a considerable computational gain without compromising the accuracy of the model in comparison with both batch methodologies and other state-of-art adaptive methods.
Keywords: Online feature extraction; Generalized discriminative common vectors; Dual learning; Incremental learning; Decremental learning
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Lluis Gomez, Marçal Rusiñol, Ali Furkan Biten and Dimosthenis Karatzas. 2018. Subtitulació automàtica d'imatges. Estat de l'art i limitacions en el context arxivístic. Jornades Imatge i Recerca.
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Dena Bazazian, Dimosthenis Karatzas and Andrew Bagdanov. 2018. Soft-PHOC Descriptor for End-to-End Word Spotting in Egocentric Scene Images. International Workshop on Egocentric Perception, Interaction and Computing at ECCV.
Abstract: Word spotting in natural scene images has many applications in scene understanding and visual assistance. We propose Soft-PHOC, an intermediate representation of images based on character probability maps. Our representation extends the concept of the Pyramidal Histogram Of Characters (PHOC) by exploiting Fully Convolutional Networks to derive a pixel-wise mapping of the character distribution within candidate word regions. We show how to use our descriptors for word spotting tasks in egocentric camera streams through an efficient text line proposal algorithm. This is based on the Hough Transform over character attribute maps followed by scoring using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). We evaluate our results on ICDAR 2015 Challenge 4 dataset of incidental scene text captured by an egocentric camera.
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Raul Gomez, Lluis Gomez, Jaume Gibert and Dimosthenis Karatzas. 2018. Learning to Learn from Web Data through Deep Semantic Embeddings. 15th European Conference on Computer Vision Workshops.514–529. (LNCS.)
Abstract: In this paper we propose to learn a multimodal image and text embedding from Web and Social Media data, aiming to leverage the semantic knowledge learnt in the text domain and transfer it to a visual model for semantic image retrieval. We demonstrate that the pipeline can learn from images with associated text without supervision and perform a thourough analysis of five different text embeddings in three different benchmarks. We show that the embeddings learnt with Web and Social Media data have competitive performances over supervised methods in the text based image retrieval task, and we clearly outperform state of the art in the MIRFlickr dataset when training in the target data. Further we demonstrate how semantic multimodal image retrieval can be performed using the learnt embeddings, going beyond classical instance-level retrieval problems. Finally, we present a new dataset, InstaCities1M, composed by Instagram images and their associated texts that can be used for fair comparison of image-text embeddings.
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