Abstract: The emergence of geometric deep learning as a novel framework to deal with graph-based representations has faded away traditional approaches in favor of completely new methodologies. In this paper, we propose a new framework able to combine the advances on deep metric learning with traditional approximations of the graph edit distance. Hence, we propose an efficient graph distance based on the novel field of geometric deep learning. Our method employs a message passing neural network to capture the graph structure, and thus, leveraging this information for its use on a distance computation. The performance of the proposed graph distance is validated on two different scenarios. On the one hand, in a graph retrieval of handwritten words i.e. keyword spotting, showing its superior performance when compared with (approximate) graph edit distance benchmarks. On the other hand, demonstrating competitive results for graph similarity learning when compared with the current state-of-the-art on a recent benchmark dataset.

Abstract: Existing work on DocVQA only considers single-page documents. However, in real applications documents are mostly composed of multiple pages that should be processed altogether. In this work, we propose a new multimodal hierarchical method Hi-VT5, that overcomes the limitations of current methods to process long multipage documents. In contrast to previous hierarchical methods that focus on different semantic granularity (He et al., 2021) or different subtasks (Zhou et al., 2022) used in image classification. Our method is a hierarchical transformer architecture where the encoder learns to summarize the most relevant information of every page and then, the decoder uses this summarized representation to generate the final answer, following a bottom-up approach. Moreover, due to the lack of multipage DocVQA datasets, we also introduce MP-DocVQA, an extension of SP-DocVQA where questions are posed over multipage documents instead of single pages. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that Hi-VT5 is able, in a single stage, to answer the questions and provide the page that contains the answer, which can be used as a kind of explainability measure.

Abstract: Class-specific text proposal algorithms can efficiently reduce the search space for possible text object locations in an image. In this paper we combine the Text Proposals algorithm with Fully Convolutional Networks to efficiently reduce the number of proposals while maintaining the same recall level and thus gaining a significant speed up. Our experiments demonstrate that such text proposal approaches yield significantly higher recall rates than state-of-the-art text localization techniques, while also producing better-quality localizations. Our results on the ICDAR 2015 Robust Reading Competition (Challenge 4) and the COCO-text datasets show that, when combined with strong word classifiers, this recall margin leads to state-of-the-art results in end-to-end scene text recognition.

Abstract: During the last years, graph-based representations are experiencing a growing usage in visual recognition and retrieval due to their ability to capture both structural and appearance-based information. Thus, they provide a greater representational power than classical statistical frameworks. However, graph-based representations leads to high computational complexities usually dealt by graph embeddings or approximated matching techniques. Despite their representational power, they are very sensitive to noise and small variations of the input image. With the aim to cope with the time complexity and the variability present in the generated graphs, in this paper we propose to construct a novel hierarchical graph representation. Graph clustering techniques adapted from social media analysis have been used in order to contract a graph at different abstraction levels while keeping information about the topology. Abstract nodes attributes summarise information about the contracted graph partition. For the proposed representations, a coarse-to-fine matching technique is defined. Hence, small graphs are used as a filtering before more accurate matching methods are applied. This approach has been validated in real scenarios such as classification of colour images or retrieval of handwritten words (i.e. word spotting).

Abstract: Images with visual and scene text content are ubiquitous in everyday life. However, current image interpretation systems are mostly limited to using only the visual features, neglecting to leverage the scene text content. In this paper, we propose to jointly use scene text and visual channels for robust semantic interpretation of images. We do not only extract and encode visual and scene text cues, but also model their interplay to generate a contextual joint embedding with richer semantics. The contextual embedding thus generated is applied to retrieval and classification tasks on multimedia images, with scene text content, to demonstrate its effectiveness. In the retrieval framework, we augment our learned text-visual semantic representation with scene text cues, to mitigate vocabulary misses that may have occurred during the semantic embedding. To deal with irrelevant or erroneous recognition of scene text, we also apply query-based attention to our text channel. We show how the multi-channel approach, involving visual semantics and scene text, improves upon state of the art.