Abstract: Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a few-shot learning-based handwriting recognition approach that significantly reduces the human annotation process, by requiring only a few images of each alphabet symbols. The method consists of detecting all the symbols of a given alphabet in a textline image and decoding the obtained similarity scores to the final sequence of transcribed symbols. Our model is first pretrained on synthetic line images generated from an alphabet, which could differ from the alphabet of the target domain. A second training step is then applied to reduce the gap between the source and the target data. Since this retraining would require annotation of thousands of handwritten symbols together with their bounding boxes, we propose to avoid such human effort through an unsupervised progressive learning approach that automatically assigns pseudo-labels to the unlabeled data. The evaluation on different datasets shows that our model can lead to competitive results with a significant reduction in human effort. The code will be publicly available in the following repository: https://github.com/dali92002/HTRbyMatching

Abstract: This paper presents a symbol spotting approach for indexing by content a database of line-drawing images. As line-drawings are digital-born documents designed by vectorial softwares, instead of using a pixel-based approach, we present a spotting method based on vector primitives. Graphical symbols are represented by a set of vectorial primitives which are described by an off-the-shelf shape descriptor. A relational indexing strategy aims to retrieve symbol locations into the target documents by using a combined numerical-relational description of 2D structures. The zones which are likely to contain the queried symbol are validated by a Hough-like voting scheme. In addition, a performance evaluation framework for symbol spotting in graphical documents is proposed. The presented methodology has been evaluated with a benchmarking set of architectural documents achieving good performance results.

Abstract: Multimodal learning from document data has achieved great success lately as it allows to pre-train semantically meaningful features as a prior into a learnable downstream approach. In this paper, we approach the document classification problem by learning cross-modal representations through language and vision cues, considering intra- and inter-modality relationships. Instead of merging features from different modalities into a common representation space, the proposed method exploits high-level interactions and learns relevant semantic information from effective attention flows within and across modalities. The proposed learning objective is devised between intra- and inter-modality alignment tasks, where the similarity distribution per task is computed by contracting positive sample pairs while simultaneously contrasting negative ones in the common feature representation space}. Extensive experiments on public document classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and the generalization capacity of our model on both low-scale and large-scale datasets.

Abstract: Scene image or video understanding is a challenging task especially when number of video types increases drastically with high variations in background and foreground. This paper proposes a new method for categorizing scene videos into different classes, namely, Animation, Outlet, Sports, e-Learning, Medical, Weather, Defense, Economics, Animal Planet and Technology, for the performance improvement of text detection and recognition, which is an effective approach for scene image or video understanding. For this purpose, at first, we present a new combination of rough and fuzzy concept to study irregular shapes of edge components in input scene videos, which helps to classify edge components into several groups. Next, the proposed method explores gradient direction information of each pixel in each edge component group to extract stroke based features by dividing each group into several intra and inter planes. We further extract correlation and covariance features to encode semantic features located inside planes or between planes. Features of intra and inter planes of groups are then concatenated to get a feature matrix. Finally, the feature matrix is verified with temporal frames and fed to a neural network for categorization. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods, at the same time, the performances of text detection and recognition methods are also improved significantly due to categorization.