Abstract: This paper presents final results of ICDAR 2019 Scene Text Visual Question Answering competition (ST-VQA). ST-VQA introduces an important aspect that is not addressed
by any Visual Question Answering system up to date, namely the incorporation of scene text to answer questions asked about an image. The competition introduces a new dataset comprising 23, 038 images annotated with 31, 791 question / answer pairs where the answer is always grounded on text instances present in the image. The images are taken from 7 different public computer vision datasets, covering a wide range of scenarios.
The competition was structured in three tasks of increasing difficulty, that require reading the text in a scene and understanding it in the context of the scene, to correctly answer a given question. A novel evaluation metric is presented, which elegantly assesses both key capabilities expected from an optimal model: text recognition and image understanding. A detailed analysis of results from different participants is showcased, which provides insight into the current capabilities of VQA systems that can read. We firmly believe the dataset proposed in this challenge will be an important milestone to consider towards a path of more robust and general models that
can exploit scene text to achieve holistic image understanding.

Abstract: Historical cryptology studies (original) encrypted manuscripts, often handwritten sources, produced in our history. These historical sources can be found in archives, often hidden without any indexing and therefore hard to locate. Once found they need to be digitized and turned into a machine-readable text format before they can be deciphered with computational methods. The focus of historical cryptology is not primarily the development of sophisticated algorithms for decipherment, but rather the entire process of analysis of the encrypted source from collection and digitization to transcription and decryption. The process also includes the interpretation and contextualization of the message set in its historical context. There are many challenges on the way, such as mistakes made by the scribe, errors made by the transcriber, damaged pages, handwriting styles that are difficult to interpret, historical languages from various time periods, and hidden underlying language of the message. Ciphertexts vary greatly in terms of their code system and symbol sets used with more or less distinguishable symbols. Ciphertexts can be embedded in clearly written text, or shorter or longer sequences of cleartext can be embedded in the ciphertext. The ciphers used mostly in historical times are substitutions (simple, homophonic, or polyphonic), with or without nomenclatures, encoded as digits or symbol sequences, with or without spaces. So the circumstances are different from those in modern cryptography which focuses on methods (algorithms) and their strengths and assumes that the algorithm is applied correctly. For both historical and modern cryptology, attack vectors outside the algorithm are applied like implementation flaws and side-channel attacks. In this chapter, we give an introduction to the field of historical cryptology and present an overview of how researchers today process historical encrypted sources.

Abstract: Se analizan los sistemas de procesamiento automático que trabajan sobre documentos digitalizados con el objetivo de describir los contenidos. De esta forma contribuyen a facilitar el acceso, permitir la indización automática y hacer accesibles los documentos a los motores de búsqueda. El objetivo de estas tecnologías es poder entrenar modelos computacionales que sean capaces de clasificar, agrupar o realizar búsquedas sobre documentos digitales. Así, se describen las tareas de clasificación, agrupamiento y búsqueda. Cuando utilizamos tecnologías de inteligencia artificial en los sistemas de
clasificación esperamos que la herramienta nos devuelva etiquetas semánticas; en sistemas de agrupamiento que nos devuelva documentos agrupados en clusters significativos; y en sistemas de búsqueda esperamos que dada una consulta, nos devuelva una lista ordenada de documentos en función de la relevancia. A continuación se da una visión de conjunto de los métodos que nos permiten describir los documentos digitales, tanto de manera visual (cuál es su apariencia), como a partir de sus contenidos semánticos (de qué hablan). En cuanto a la descripción visual de documentos se aborda el estado de la cuestión de las representaciones numéricas de documentos digitalizados
tanto por métodos clásicos como por métodos basados en el aprendizaje profundo (deep learning). Respecto de la descripción semántica de los contenidos se analizan técnicas como el reconocimiento óptico de caracteres (OCR); el cálculo de estadísticas básicas sobre la aparición de las diferentes palabras en un texto (bag-of-words model); y los métodos basados en aprendizaje profundo como el método word2vec, basado en una red neuronal que, dadas unas cuantas palabras de un texto, debe predecir cuál será la
siguiente palabra. Desde el campo de las ingenierías se están transfiriendo conocimientos que se han integrado en productos o servicios en los ámbitos de la archivística, la biblioteconomía, la documentación y las plataformas de gran consumo, sin embargo los algoritmos deben ser lo suficientemente eficientes no sólo para el reconocimiento y transcripción literal sino también para la capacidad de interpretación de los contenidos.

Abstract: Document Layout Analysis (DLA) is the process of automatically identifying and categorizing the structural components (e.g. Text, Figure, Table, etc.) within a document to extract meaningful content and establish the page's layout structure. It is a crucial stage in document parsing, contributing to their comprehension. However, traditional DLA approaches often demand a significant volume of labeled training data, and the labor-intensive task of generating high-quality annotated training data poses a substantial challenge. In order to address this challenge, we proposed a semi-supervised setting that aims to perform learning on limited annotated categories by eliminating exhaustive and expensive mask annotations. The proposed setting is expected to be generalizable to novel categories as it learns the underlying positional information through a support set and class information through Co-Occurrence that can be generalized from annotated categories to novel categories. Here, we first extract features from the input image and support set with a shared multi-scale feature acquisition backbone. Then, the extracted feature representation is fed to the transformer encoder as a query. Later on, we utilize a semantic embedding network before the decoder to capture the underlying semantic relationships and similarities between different instances, enabling the model to make accurate predictions or classifications with only a limited amount of labeled data. Extensive experimentation on competitive benchmarks like PRIMA, DocLayNet, and Historical Japanese (HJ) demonstrate that this generalized setup obtains significant performance compared to the conventional supervised approach.

Abstract: In this work, we address the task of scene text retrieval: given a text query, the system returns all images containing the queried text. The proposed model uses a single shot CNN architecture that predicts bounding boxes and builds a compact representation of spotted words. In this way, this problem can be modeled as a nearest neighbor search of the textual representation of a query over the outputs of the CNN collected from the totality of an image database. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms previous state-of-the-art, while offering a significant increase in processing speed and unmatched expressiveness with samples never seen at training time. Several experiments to assess the generalization capability of the model are conducted in a multilingual dataset, as well as an application of real-time text spotting in videos.