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Lluis Pere de las Heras. 2014. Relational Models for Visual Understanding of Graphical Documents. Application to Architectural Drawings. (Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey.)
Abstract: Graphical documents express complex concepts using a visual language. This language consists of a vocabulary (symbols) and a syntax (structural relations between symbols) that articulate a semantic meaning in a certain context. Therefore, the automatic interpretation by computers of these sort of documents entails three main steps: the detection of the symbols, the extraction of the structural relations between these symbols, and the modeling of the knowledge that permits the extraction of the semantics. Dierent domains in graphical documents include: architectural and engineering drawings, maps, owcharts, etc.
Graphics Recognition in particular and Document Image Analysis in general are
born from the industrial need of interpreting a massive amount of digitalized documents after the emergence of the scanner. Although many years have passed, the graphical document understanding problem still seems to be far from being solved. The main reason is that the vast majority of the systems in the literature focus on very specic problems, where the domain of the document dictates the implementation of the interpretation. As a result, it is dicult to reuse these strategies on dierent data and on dierent contexts, hindering thus the natural progress in the eld.
In this thesis, we face the graphical document understanding problem by proposing several relational models at dierent levels that are designed from a generic perspective. Firstly, we introduce three dierent strategies for the detection of symbols. The first method tackles the problem structurally, wherein general knowledge of the domain guides the detection. The second is a statistical method that learns the graphical appearance of the symbols and easily adapts to the big variability of the problem. The third method is a combination of the previous two methods that inherits their respective strengths, i.e. copes the big variability and does not need annotated data. Secondly, we present two relational strategies that tackle the problem of the visual context extraction. The first one is a full bottom up method that heuristically searches in a graph representation the contextual relations between symbols. Contrarily, the second is syntactic method that models probabilistically the structure of the documents. It automatically learns the model, which guides the inference algorithm to encounter the best structural representation for a given input. Finally, we construct a knowledge-based model consisting of an ontological denition of the domain and real data. This model permits to perform contextual reasoning and to detect semantic inconsistencies within the data. We evaluate the suitability of the proposed contributions in the framework of floor plan interpretation. Since there is no standard in the modeling of these documents there exists an enormous notation variability from plan to plan in terms of vocabulary and syntax. Therefore, floor plan interpretation is a relevant task in the graphical document understanding problem. It is also worth to mention that we make freely available all the resources used in this thesis {the data, the tool used to generate the data, and the evaluation scripts{ with the aim of fostering research in the graphical document understanding task.
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Hongxing Gao. 2015. Focused Structural Document Image Retrieval in Digital Mailroom Applications. (Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey.)
Abstract: In this work, we develop a generic framework that is able to handle the document retrieval problem in various scenarios such as searching for full page matches or retrieving the counterparts for specific document areas, focusing on their structural similarity or letting their visual resemblance to play a dominant role. Based on the spatial indexing technique, we propose to search for matches of local key-region pairs carrying both structural and visual information from the collection while a scheme allowing to adjust the relative contribution of structural and visual similarity is presented.
Based on the fact that the structure of documents is tightly linked with the distance among their elements, we firstly introduce an efficient detector named Distance Transform based Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (DTMSER). We illustrate that this detector is able to efficiently extract the structure of a document image as a dendrogram (hierarchical tree) of multi-scale key-regions that roughly correspond to letters, words and paragraphs. We demonstrate that, without benefiting from the structure information, the key-regions extracted by the DTMSER algorithm achieve better results comparing with state-of-the-art methods while much less amount of key-regions are employed.
We subsequently propose a pair-wise Bag of Words (BoW) framework to efficiently embed the explicit structure extracted by the DTMSER algorithm. We represent each document as a list of key-region pairs that correspond to the edges in the dendrogram where inclusion relationship is encoded. By employing those structural key-region pairs as the pooling elements for generating the histogram of features, the proposed method is able to encode the explicit inclusion relations into a BoW representation. The experimental results illustrate that the pair-wise BoW, powered by the embedded structural information, achieves remarkable improvement over the conventional BoW and spatial pyramidal BoW methods.
To handle various retrieval scenarios in one framework, we propose to directly query a series of key-region pairs, carrying both structure and visual information, from the collection. We introduce the spatial indexing techniques to the document retrieval community to speed up the structural relationship computation for key-region pairs. We firstly test the proposed framework in a full page retrieval scenario where structurally similar matches are expected. In this case, the pair-wise querying method achieves notable improvement over the BoW and spatial pyramidal BoW frameworks. Furthermore, we illustrate that the proposed method is also able to handle focused retrieval situations where the queries are defined as a specific interesting partial areas of the images. We examine our method on two types of focused queries: structure-focused and exact queries. The experimental results show that, the proposed generic framework obtains nearly perfect precision on both types of focused queries while it is the first framework able to tackle structure-focused queries, setting a new state of the art in the field.
Besides, we introduce a line verification method to check the spatial consistency among the matched key-region pairs. We propose a computationally efficient version of line verification through a two step implementation. We first compute tentative localizations of the query and subsequently employ them to divide the matched key-region pairs into several groups, then line verification is performed within each group while more precise bounding boxes are computed. We demonstrate that, comparing with the standard approach (based on RANSAC), the line verification proposed generally achieves much higher recall with slight loss on precision on specific queries.
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Olivier Lefebvre and 6 others. 2015. Monitoring neuromotricity on-line: a cloud computing approach. 17th Conference of the International Graphonomics Society IGS2015.
Abstract: The goal of our experiment is to develop a useful and accessible tool that can be used to evaluate a patient's health by analyzing handwritten strokes. We use a cloud computing approach to analyze stroke data sampled on a commercial tablet working on the Android platform and a distant server to perform complex calculations using the Delta and Sigma lognormal algorithms. A Google Drive account is used to store the data and to ease the development of the project. The communication between the tablet, the cloud and the server is encrypted to ensure biomedical information confidentiality. Highly parameterized biomedical tests are implemented on the tablet as well as a free drawing test to evaluate the validity of the data acquired by the first test compared to the second one. A blurred shape model descriptor pattern recognition algorithm is used to classify the data obtained by the free drawing test. The functions presented in this paper are still currently under development and other improvements are needed before launching the application in the public domain.
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Youssef El Rhabi, Simon Loic and Brun Luc. 2015. Estimation de la pose d’une caméra à partir d’un flux vidéo en s’approchant du temps réel. 15ème édition d'ORASIS, journées francophones des jeunes chercheurs en vision par ordinateur ORASIS2015.
Abstract: Finding a way to estimate quickly and robustly the pose of an image is essential in augmented reality. Here we will discuss the approach we chose in order to get closer to real time by using SIFT points [4]. We propose a method based on filtering both SIFT points and images on which to focus on. Hence we will focus on relevant data.
Keywords: Augmented Reality; SFM; SLAM; real time pose computation; 2D/3D registration
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Nuria Cirera, Alicia Fornes and Josep Llados. 2015. Hidden Markov model topology optimization for handwriting recognition. 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015.626–630.
Abstract: In this paper we present a method to optimize the topology of linear left-to-right hidden Markov models. These models are very popular for sequential signals modeling on tasks such as handwriting recognition. Many topology definition methods select the number of states for a character model based
on character length. This can be a drawback when characters are shorter than the minimum allowed by the model, since they can not be properly trained nor recognized. The proposed method optimizes the number of states per model by automatically including convenient skip-state transitions and therefore it avoids the aforementioned problem.We discuss and compare our method with other character length-based methods such the Fixed, Bakis and Quantile methods. Our proposal performs well on off-line handwriting recognition task.
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Juan Ignacio Toledo, Jordi Cucurull, Jordi Puiggali, Alicia Fornes and Josep Llados. 2015. Document Analysis Techniques for Automatic Electoral Document Processing: A Survey. E-Voting and Identity, Proceedings of 5th international conference, VoteID 2015.139–141. (LNCS.)
Abstract: In this paper, we will discuss the most common challenges in electoral document processing and study the different solutions from the document analysis community that can be applied in each case. We will cover Optical Mark Recognition techniques to detect voter selections in the Australian Ballot, handwritten number recognition for preferential elections and handwriting recognition for write-in areas. We will also propose some particular adjustments that can be made to those general techniques in the specific context of electoral documents.
Keywords: Document image analysis; Computer vision; Paper ballots; Paper based elections; Optical scan; Tally
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Pau Riba, Josep Llados and Alicia Fornes. 2015. Handwritten Word Spotting by Inexact Matching of Grapheme Graphs. 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015.781–785.
Abstract: This paper presents a graph-based word spotting for handwritten documents. Contrary to most word spotting techniques, which use statistical representations, we propose a structural representation suitable to be robust to the inherent deformations of handwriting. Attributed graphs are constructed using a part-based approach. Graphemes extracted from shape convexities are used as stable units of handwriting, and are associated to graph nodes. Then, spatial relations between them determine graph edges. Spotting is defined in terms of an error-tolerant graph matching using bipartite-graph matching algorithm. To make the method usable in large datasets, a graph indexing approach that makes use of binary embeddings is used as preprocessing. Historical documents are used as experimental framework. The approach is comparable to statistical ones in terms of time and memory requirements, especially when dealing with large document collections.
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J. Chazalon, Marçal Rusiñol and Jean-Marc Ogier. 2015. Improving Document Matching Performance by Local Descriptor Filtering. 6th IAPR International Workshop on Camera Based Document Analysis and Recognition CBDAR2015.1216–1220.
Abstract: In this paper we propose an effective method aimed at reducing the amount of local descriptors to be indexed in a document matching framework. In an off-line training stage, the matching between the model document and incoming images is computed retaining the local descriptors from the model that steadily produce good matches. We have evaluated this approach by using the ICDAR2015 SmartDOC dataset containing near 25 000 images from documents to be captured by a mobile device. We have tested the performance of this filtering step by using
ORB and SIFT local detectors and descriptors. The results show an important gain both in quality of the final matching as well as in time and space requirements.
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Jean-Christophe Burie and 9 others. 2015. ICDAR2015 Competition on Smartphone Document Capture and OCR (SmartDoc). 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015.1161–1165.
Abstract: Smartphones are enabling new ways of capture,
hence arises the need for seamless and reliable acquisition and
digitization of documents, in order to convert them to editable,
searchable and a more human-readable format. Current stateof-the-art
works lack databases and baseline benchmarks for
digitizing mobile captured documents. We have organized a
competition for mobile document capture and OCR in order to
address this issue. The competition is structured into two independent
challenges: smartphone document capture, and smartphone
OCR. This report describes the datasets for both challenges
along with their ground truth, details the performance evaluation
protocols which we used, and presents the final results of the
participating methods. In total, we received 13 submissions: 8
for challenge-I, and 5 for challenge-2.
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Marçal Rusiñol, David Aldavert, Ricardo Toledo and Josep Llados. 2015. Towards Query-by-Speech Handwritten Keyword Spotting. 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015.501–505.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a new querying paradigm for handwritten keyword spotting. We propose to represent handwritten word images both by visual and audio representations, enabling a query-by-speech keyword spotting system. The two representations are merged together and projected to a common sub-space in the training phase. This transform allows to, given a spoken query, retrieve word instances that were only represented by the visual modality. In addition, the same method can be used backwards at no additional cost to produce a handwritten text-tospeech system. We present our first results on this new querying mechanism using synthetic voices over the George Washington
dataset.
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