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Lei Kang, Pau Riba, Marçal Rusiñol, Alicia Fornes and Mauricio Villegas. 2020. Distilling Content from Style for Handwritten Word Recognition. 17th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition.
Abstract: Despite the latest transcription accuracies reached using deep neural network architectures, handwritten text recognition still remains a challenging problem, mainly because of the large inter-writer style variability. Both augmenting the training set with artificial samples using synthetic fonts, and writer adaptation techniques have been proposed to yield more generic approaches aimed at dodging style unevenness. In this work, we take a step closer to learn style independent features from handwritten word images. We propose a novel method that is able to disentangle the content and style aspects of input images by jointly optimizing a generative process and a handwritten
word recognizer. The generator is aimed at transferring writing style features from one sample to another in an image-to-image translation approach, thus leading to a learned content-centric features that shall be independent to writing style attributes.
Our proposed recognition model is able then to leverage such writer-agnostic features to reach better recognition performances. We advance over prior training strategies and demonstrate with qualitative and quantitative evaluations the performance of both
the generative process and the recognition efficiency in the IAM dataset.
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Lei Kang, Pau Riba, Yaxing Wang, Marçal Rusiñol, Alicia Fornes and Mauricio Villegas. 2020. GANwriting: Content-Conditioned Generation of Styled Handwritten Word Images. 16th European Conference on Computer Vision.
Abstract: Although current image generation methods have reached impressive quality levels, they are still unable to produce plausible yet diverse images of handwritten words. On the contrary, when writing by hand, a great variability is observed across different writers, and even when analyzing words scribbled by the same individual, involuntary variations are conspicuous. In this work, we take a step closer to producing realistic and varied artificially rendered handwritten words. We propose a novel method that is able to produce credible handwritten word images by conditioning the generative process with both calligraphic style features and textual content. Our generator is guided by three complementary learning objectives: to produce realistic images, to imitate a certain handwriting style and to convey a specific textual content. Our model is unconstrained to any predefined vocabulary, being able to render whatever input word. Given a sample writer, it is also able to mimic its calligraphic features in a few-shot setup. We significantly advance over prior art and demonstrate with qualitative, quantitative and human-based evaluations the realistic aspect of our synthetically produced images.
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Mohamed Ali Souibgui, Y.Kessentini and Alicia Fornes. 2020. A conditional GAN based approach for distorted camera captured documents recovery. 4th Mediterranean Conference on Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence.
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Manuel Carbonell, Alicia Fornes, Mauricio Villegas and Josep Llados. 2020. A Neural Model for Text Localization, Transcription and Named Entity Recognition in Full Pages. PRL, 136, 219–227.
Abstract: In the last years, the consolidation of deep neural network architectures for information extraction in document images has brought big improvements in the performance of each of the tasks involved in this process, consisting of text localization, transcription, and named entity recognition. However, this process is traditionally performed with separate methods for each task. In this work we propose an end-to-end model that combines a one stage object detection network with branches for the recognition of text and named entities respectively in a way that shared features can be learned simultaneously from the training error of each of the tasks. By doing so the model jointly performs handwritten text detection, transcription, and named entity recognition at page level with a single feed forward step. We exhaustively evaluate our approach on different datasets, discussing its advantages and limitations compared to sequential approaches. The results show that the model is capable of benefiting from shared features by simultaneously solving interdependent tasks.
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B. Gautam, Oriol Ramos Terrades, Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora and Miquel Valls-Figols. 2020. Knowledge graph based methods for record linkage. PRL, 136, 127–133.
Abstract: Nowadays, it is common in Historical Demography the use of individual-level data as a consequence of a predominant life-course approach for the understanding of the demographic behaviour, family transition, mobility, etc. Advanced record linkage is key since it allows increasing the data complexity and its volume to be analyzed. However, current methods are constrained to link data from the same kind of sources. Knowledge graph are flexible semantic representations, which allow to encode data variability and semantic relations in a structured manner.
In this paper we propose the use of knowledge graph methods to tackle record linkage tasks. The proposed method, named WERL, takes advantage of the main knowledge graph properties and learns embedding vectors to encode census information. These embeddings are properly weighted to maximize the record linkage performance. We have evaluated this method on benchmark data sets and we have compared it to related methods with stimulating and satisfactory results.
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Fernando Vilariño. 2020. Unveiling the Social Impact of AI. Workshop at Digital Living Lab Days Conference.
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Debora Gil, Oriol Ramos Terrades and Raquel Perez. 2020. Topological Radiomics (TOPiomics): Early Detection of Genetic Abnormalities in Cancer Treatment Evolution. Women in Geometry and Topology.
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Oriol Ramos Terrades, Albert Berenguel and Debora Gil. 2020. A flexible outlier detector based on a topology given by graph communities.
Abstract: Outlier, or anomaly, detection is essential for optimal performance of machine learning methods and statistical predictive models. It is not just a technical step in a data cleaning process but a key topic in many fields such as fraudulent document detection, in medical applications and assisted diagnosis systems or detecting security threats. In contrast to population-based methods, neighborhood based local approaches are simple flexible methods that have the potential to perform well in small sample size unbalanced problems. However, a main concern of local approaches is the impact that the computation of each sample neighborhood has on the method performance. Most approaches use a distance in the feature space to define a single neighborhood that requires careful selection of several parameters. This work presents a local approach based on a local measure of the heterogeneity of sample labels in the feature space considered as a topological manifold. Topology is computed using the communities of a weighted graph codifying mutual nearest neighbors in the feature space. This way, we provide with a set of multiple neighborhoods able to describe the structure of complex spaces without parameter fine tuning. The extensive experiments on real-world data sets show that our approach overall outperforms, both, local and global strategies in multi and single view settings.
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Pau Riba. 2020. Distilling Structure from Imagery: Graph-based Models for the Interpretation of Document Images. (Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey.)
Abstract: From its early stages, the community of Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision has considered the importance of leveraging the structural information when understanding images. Usually, graphs have been proposed as a suitable model to represent this kind of information due to their flexibility and representational power able to codify both, the components, objects, or entities and their pairwise relationship. Even though graphs have been successfully applied to a huge variety of tasks, as a result of their symbolic and relational nature, graphs have always suffered from some limitations compared to statistical approaches. Indeed, some trivial mathematical operations do not have an equivalence in the graph domain. For instance, in the core of many pattern recognition applications, there is a need to compare two objects. This operation, which is trivial when considering feature vectors defined in \(\mathbb{R}^n\), is not properly defined for graphs.
In this thesis, we have investigated the importance of the structural information from two perspectives, the traditional graph-based methods and the new advances on Geometric Deep Learning. On the one hand, we explore the problem of defining a graph representation and how to deal with it on a large scale and noisy scenario. On the other hand, Graph Neural Networks are proposed to first redefine a Graph Edit Distance methodologies as a metric learning problem, and second, to apply them in a real use case scenario for the detection of repetitive patterns which define tables in invoice documents. As experimental framework, we have validated the different methodological contributions in the domain of Document Image Analysis and Recognition.
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Raul Gomez. 2020. Exploiting the Interplay between Visual and Textual Data for Scene Interpretation. (Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey.)
Abstract: Machine learning experimentation under controlled scenarios and standard datasets is necessary to compare algorithms performance by evaluating all of them in the same setup. However, experimentation on how those algorithms perform on unconstrained data and applied tasks to solve real world problems is also a must to ascertain how that research can contribute to our society.
In this dissertation we experiment with the latest computer vision and natural language processing algorithms applying them to multimodal scene interpretation. Particularly, we research on how image and text understanding can be jointly exploited to address real world problems, focusing on learning from Social Media data.
We address several tasks that involve image and textual information, discuss their characteristics and offer our experimentation conclusions. First, we work on detection of scene text in images. Then, we work with Social Media posts, exploiting the captions associated to images as supervision to learn visual features, which we apply to multimodal semantic image retrieval. Subsequently, we work with geolocated Social Media images with associated tags, experimenting on how to use the tags as supervision, on location sensitive image retrieval and on exploiting location information for image tagging. Finally, we work on a specific classification problem of Social Media publications consisting on an image and a text: Multimodal hate speech classification.
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