Abstract: Writing is one of the most important forms of communication and for centuries, handwriting had been the most reliable way to preserve knowledge. However, despite the recent development of printing houses and electronic devices, handwriting is still broadly used for taking notes, doing annotations, or sketching ideas.
Transferring the ability of understanding handwritten text or recognizing handwritten shapes to computers has been the goal of many researches due to its huge importance for many different fields. However, designing good representations to deal with handwritten shapes, e.g. symbols or words, is a very challenging problem due to the large variability of these kinds of shapes. One of the consequences of working with handwritten shapes is that we need representations to be robust, i.e., able to adapt to large intra-class variability. We need representations to be discriminative, i.e., able to learn what are the differences between classes. And, we need representations to be efficient, i.e., able to be rapidly computed and compared. Unfortunately, current techniques of handwritten shape representation for matching and recognition do not fulfill some or all of these requirements.
Through this thesis we focus on the problem of learning to represent handwritten shapes aimed at retrieval and recognition tasks. Concretely, on the first part of the thesis, we focus on the general problem of representing any kind of handwritten shape. We first present a novel shape descriptor based on a deformable grid that deals with large deformations by adapting to the shape and where the cells of the grid can be used to extract different features. Then, we propose to use this descriptor to learn statistical models, based on the Active Appearance Model, that jointly learns the variability in structure and texture of a given class. Then, on the second part, we focus on a concrete application, the problem of representing handwritten words, for the tasks of word spotting, where the goal is to find all instances of a query word in a dataset of images, and recognition. First, we address the segmentation-free problem and propose an unsupervised, sliding-window-based approach that achieves state-of- the-art results in two public datasets. Second, we address the more challenging multi-writer problem, where the variability in words exponentially increases. We describe an approach in which both word images and text strings are embedded in a common vectorial subspace, and where those that represent the same word are close together. This is achieved by a combination of label embedding and attributes learning, and a common subspace regression. This leads to a low-dimensional, unified representation of word images and strings, resulting in a method that allows one to perform either image and text searches, as well as image transcription, in a unified framework. We evaluate our methods on different public datasets of both handwritten documents and natural images showing results comparable or better than the state-of-the-art on spotting and recognition tasks.

Abstract: In this article, we focus on the problem of large-scale instance-level image retrieval. For efficiency reasons, it is common to represent an image by a fixed-length descriptor which is subsequently encoded into a small number of bits. We note that most encoding techniques include an unsupervised dimensionality reduction step. Our goal in this work is to learn a better subspace in a supervised manner. We especially raise the following question: “can category-level labels be used to learn such a subspace?” To answer this question, we experiment with four learning techniques: the first one is based on a metric learning framework, the second one on attribute representations, the third one on Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) and the fourth one on Joint Subspace and Classifier Learning (JSCL). While the first three approaches have been applied in the past to the image retrieval problem, we believe we are the first to show the usefulness of JSCL in this context. In our experiments, we use ImageNet as a source of category-level labels and report retrieval results on two standard dataseis: INRIA Holidays and the University of Kentucky benchmark. Our experimental study shows that metric learning and attributes do not lead to any significant improvement in retrieval accuracy, as opposed to CCA and JSCL. As an example, we report on Holidays an increase in accuracy from 39.3% to 48.6% with 32-dimensional representations. Overall JSCL is shown to yield the best results.

Abstract: Libraries are in deep transformation both in EU and around the world, and they are thriving within a great window of opportunity for innovation. In this paper, we show how the Library Living Lab in Barcelona participated of this changing scenario and contributed to create the Bibliolab program, where more than 200 public libraries give voice to their users in a global user-centric innovation initiative, using technology as enabling factor. The Library Living Lab is a real 4-helix implementation where Universities, Research Centers, Public Administration, Companies and the Neighbors are joint together to explore how technology transforms the cultural experience of people. This case is an example of scalability and provides reference tools for policy making, sustainability, user engage methodologies and governance. We provide specific examples of new prototypes and services that help to understand how to redefine the role of the Library as a real hub for social innovation.

Abstract: A method for estimating the non-linear gamma transfer function of liquid–crystal displays (LCDs) without the need of a photometric measurement device was described by Xiao et al. (2011) [1]. It relies on observer’s judgments of visual luminance by presenting eight half-tone patterns with luminances from 1/9 to 8/9 of the maximum value of each colour channel. These half-tone patterns were distributed over the screen both over the vertical and horizontal viewing axes. We conducted a series of photometric and psychophysical measurements (consisting in the simultaneous presentation of half-tone patterns in each trial) to evaluate whether the angular dependency of the light generated by three different LCD technologies would bias the results of these gamma transfer function estimations. Our results show that there are significant differences between the gamma transfer functions measured and produced by observers at different viewing angles. We suggest appropriate modifications to the Xiao et al. paradigm to counterbalance these artefacts which also have the advantage of shortening the amount of time spent in collecting the psychophysical measurements.