Abstract: The extraction of textual content from colour documents of a graphical nature is a complicated task. The text can be rendered in any colour, size and orientation while the existence of complex background graphics with repetitive patterns can make its localization and segmentation extremely difficult.
Here, we propose a new method for extracting textual content from such colour images that makes no assumption as to the size of the characters, their orientation or colour, while it is tolerant to characters that do not follow a straight baseline. We evaluate this method on a collection of documents with historical
connotations: the Posters from the Spanish Civil War.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new approach to extract text regions from graphical documents. In our method, we first empirically construct two sequences of learned dictionaries for the text and graphical parts respectively. Then, we compute the sparse representations of all different sizes and non-overlapped document patches in these learned dictionaries. Based on these representations, each patch can be classified into the text or graphic category by comparing its reconstruction errors. Same-sized patches in one category are then merged together to define the corresponding text or graphic layers which are combined to createfinal text/graphic layer. Finally, in a post-processing step, text regions are further filtered out by using some learned thresholds.

Abstract: Motivated by the success of powerful while expensive techniques to recognize words in a holistic way (Goel et al., 2013; Almazán et al., 2014; Jaderberg et al., 2016) object proposals techniques emerge as an alternative to the traditional text detectors. In this paper we introduce a novel object proposals method that is specifically designed for text. We rely on a similarity based region grouping algorithm that generates a hierarchy of word hypotheses. Over the nodes of this hierarchy it is possible to apply a holistic word recognition method in an efficient way.
Our experiments demonstrate that the presented method is superior in its ability of producing good quality word proposals when compared with class-independent algorithms. We show impressive recall rates with a few thousand proposals in different standard benchmarks, including focused or incidental text datasets, and multi-language scenarios. Moreover, the combination of our object proposals with existing whole-word recognizers (Almazán et al., 2014; Jaderberg et al., 2016) shows competitive performance in end-to-end word spotting, and, in some benchmarks, outperforms previously published results. Concretely, in the challenging ICDAR2015 Incidental Text dataset, we overcome in more than 10% F-score the best-performing method in the last ICDAR Robust Reading Competition (Karatzas, 2015). Source code of the complete end-to-end system is available at https://github.com/lluisgomez/TextProposals.

Abstract: This paper presents a first approach to build colour and structural descriptors for information retrieval on a people database. Queries are formulated in terms of their appearance that allows to seek people wearing specific clothes of a given colour name or texture. Descriptors are automatically computed by following three essential steps. A colour naming labelling from pixel properties. A region seg- mentation step based on colour properties of pixels combined with edge information. And a high level step that models the region arrangements in order to build clothes structure. Results are tested on large set of images from real scenes taken at the entrance desk of a building