Abstract: In this work we introduce a cross modal image retrieval system that allows both text and sketch as input modalities for the query. A cross-modal deep network architecture is formulated to jointly model the sketch and text input modalities as well as the the image output modality, learning a common embedding between text and images and between sketches and images. In addition, an attention model is used to selectively focus the attention on the different objects of the image, allowing for retrieval with multiple objects in the query. Experiments show that the proposed method performs the best in both single and multiple object image retrieval in standard datasets.

Abstract: Graph-based representations are experiencing a growing usage in visual recognition and retrieval due to their representational power in front of classical appearance-based representations in terms of feature vectors. Retrieving a query graph from a large dataset of graphs has the drawback of the high computational complexity required to compare the query and the target graphs. The most important property for a large-scale retrieval is the search time complexity to be sub-linear in the number of database examples. In this paper we propose a fast indexation formalism for graph retrieval. A binary embedding is defined as hashing keys for graph nodes. Given a database of labeled graphs, graph nodes are complemented with vectors of attributes representing their local context. Hence, each attribute counts the length of a walk of order k originated in a vertex with label l. Each attribute vector is converted to a binary code applying a binary-valued hash function. Therefore, graph retrieval is formulated in terms of finding target graphs in the database whose nodes have a small Hamming distance from the query nodes, easily computed with bitwise logical operators. As an application example, we validate the performance of the proposed methods in a handwritten word spotting scenario in images of historical documents.

Abstract: Document analysis is an active field of research, which can attain a complete understanding of the semantics of a given document. One example of the document understanding process is enabling a computer to identify the key elements of a comic book story and arrange them according to a predefined domain knowledge. In this study, we propose a knowledge-driven system that can interact with bottom-up and top-down information to progressively understand the content of a document. We model the comic book’s and the image processing domains knowledge for information consistency analysis. In addition, different image processing methods are improved or developed to extract panels, balloons, tails, texts, comic characters and their semantic relations in an unsupervised way.

Abstract: The automatic transcription of unconstrained continuous handwritten text requires well trained recognition systems. The semi-supervised paradigm introduces the concept of not only using labeled data but also unlabeled data in the learning process. Unlabeled data can be gathered at little or not cost. Hence it has the potential to reduce the need for labeling training data, a tedious and costly process. Given a weak initial recognizer trained on labeled data, self-training can be used to recognize unlabeled data and add words that were recognized with high confidence to the training set for re-training. This process is not trivial and requires great care as far as selecting the elements that are to be added to the training set is concerned. In this paper, we propose to use a bidirectional long short-term memory neural network handwritten recognition system for keyword spotting in order to select new elements. A set of experiments shows the high potential of self-training for bootstrapping handwriting recognition systems, both for modern and historical handwritings, and demonstrate the benefits of using keyword spotting over previously published self-training schemes.