Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new data-driven approach for binary descriptor selection. In order to draw a clear analysis of common designs, we present a general information-theoretic selection paradigm. It encompasses several standard binary descriptor construction schemes, including a recent state-of-the-art one named BOLD. We pursue the same endeavor to increase the stability of the produced descriptors with respect to rotations. To achieve this goal, we have designed a novel offline selection criterion which is better adapted to the online matching procedure. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated on two standard datasets, where our descriptor is compared to BOLD and to several classical descriptors. In particular, it emerges that our approach can reproduce equivalent if not better performance as BOLD while relying on twice shorter descriptors. Such an improvement can be influential for real-time applications.

Abstract: Digital libraries store images which can be highly degraded and to index this kind of images we resort to word spotting as our information retrieval system. Information retrieval for handwritten document images is more challenging due to the difficulties in complex layout analysis, large variations of writing styles, and degradation or low quality of historical manuscripts. This paper presents a simple innovative learning-free method for word spotting from large scale historical documents combining Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and spatial sampling. This method offers three advantages: firstly, it operates in completely learning free paradigm which is very different from unsupervised learning methods, secondly, the computational time is significantly low because of the LBP features, which are very fast to compute, and thirdly, the method can be used in scenarios where annotations are not available. Finally, we compare the results of our proposed retrieval method with other methods in the literature and we obtain the best results in the learning free paradigm.

Abstract: This paper is focused on the detection of counterfeit photocopy banknotes. The main difficulty is to work on a real industrial scenario without any constraint about the acquisition device and with a single image. The main contributions of this paper are twofold: first the adaptation and performance evaluation of existing approaches to classify the genuine and photocopy banknotes using background texture printing analysis, which have not been applied into this context before. Second, a new dataset of Euro banknotes images acquired with several cameras under different luminance conditions to evaluate these methods. Experiments on the proposed algorithms show that mixing SIFT features and sparse coding dictionaries achieves quasi perfect classification using a linear SVM with the created dataset. Approaches using dictionaries to cover all possible texture variations have demonstrated to be robust and outperform the state-of-the-art methods using the proposed benchmark.

Abstract: This thesis addresses the problem of automatic scene text understanding in unconstrained conditions. In particular, we tackle the tasks of multi-language and arbitrary-oriented text detection, tracking, and script identification in natural scenes.
For this we have developed a set of generic methods that build on top of the basic observation that text has always certain key visual and structural characteristics that are independent of the language or script in which it is written. Text instances in any
language or script are always formed as groups of similar atomic parts, being them either individual characters, small stroke parts, or even whole words in the case of cursive text. This holistic (sumof-parts) and recursive perspective has lead us to explore different variants of the “segmentation and grouping” paradigm of computer vision.
Scene text detection methodologies are usually based in classification of individual regions or patches, using a priory knowledge for a given script or language. Human perception of text, on the other hand, is based on perceptual organization through which
text emerges as a perceptually significant group of atomic objects.
In this thesis, we argue that the text detection problem must be posed as the detection of meaningful groups of regions. We address the problem of text detection in natural scenes from a hierarchical perspective, making explicit use of the recursive nature of text, aiming directly to the detection of region groupings corresponding to text within a hierarchy produced by an agglomerative similarity clustering process over individual regions. We propose an optimal way to construct such an hierarchy introducing a feature space designed to produce text group hypothese with high recall and a novel stopping rule combining a discriminative classifier and a probabilistic measure of group meaningfulness based in perceptual organization. Within this generic framework, we design a text-specific object proposals algorithm that, contrary to existing generic object proposals methods, aims directly to the detection of text regions groupings. For this, we abandon the rigid definition of “what is text” of traditional specialized text detectors, and move towards more fuzzy perspective of grouping-based object proposals methods.
Then, we present a hybrid algorithm for detection and tracking of scene text where the notion of region groupings plays also a central role. By leveraging the structural arrangement of text group components between consecutive frames we can improve
the overall tracking performance of the system.
Finally, since our generic detection framework is inherently designed for multi-language environments, we focus on the problem of script identification in order to build a multi-language end-toend reading system. Facing this problem with state of the art CNN classifiers is not straightforward, as they fail to address a key
characteristic of scene text instances: their extremely variable aspect ratio. Instead of resizing input images to a fixed size as in the typical use of holistic CNN classifiers, we propose a patch-based classification framework in order to preserve discriminative parts of the image that are characteristic of its class. We describe a novel method based on the use of ensembles of conjoined networks to jointly learn discriminative stroke-parts representations and their relative importance in a patch-based classification scheme.

Abstract: The recognition of handwritten music scores still remains an open problem. The existing approaches can only deal with very simple handwritten scores mainly because of the variability in the handwriting style and the variability in the composition of groups of music notes (i.e. compound music notes). In this work we focus on this second problem and propose a method based on perceptual grouping for the recognition of compound music notes. Our method has been tested using several handwritten music scores of the CVC-MUSCIMA database and compared with a commercial Optical Music Recognition (OMR) software. Given that our method is learning-free, the obtained results are promising.