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Jon Almazan, Lluis Gomez, Suman Ghosh, Ernest Valveny and Dimosthenis Karatzas. 2020. WATTS: A common representation of word images and strings using embedded attributes for text recognition and retrieval. In Analysis”, K.A. and C.V. Jawahar, eds. Visual Text Interpretation – Algorithms and Applications in Scene Understanding and Document Analysis. Springer. (Series on Advances in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.)
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Raul Gomez, Yahui Liu, Marco de Nadai, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Bruno Lepri and Nicu Sebe. 2020. Retrieval Guided Unsupervised Multi-domain Image to Image Translation. 28th ACM International Conference on Multimedia.
Abstract: Image to image translation aims to learn a mapping that transforms an image from one visual domain to another. Recent works assume that images descriptors can be disentangled into a domain-invariant content representation and a domain-specific style representation. Thus, translation models seek to preserve the content of source images while changing the style to a target visual domain. However, synthesizing new images is extremely challenging especially in multi-domain translations, as the network has to compose content and style to generate reliable and diverse images in multiple domains. In this paper we propose the use of an image retrieval system to assist the image-to-image translation task. First, we train an image-to-image translation model to map images to multiple domains. Then, we train an image retrieval model using real and generated images to find images similar to a query one in content but in a different domain. Finally, we exploit the image retrieval system to fine-tune the image-to-image translation model and generate higher quality images. Our experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed solution and highlight the contribution of the retrieval network, which can benefit from additional unlabeled data and help image-to-image translation models in the presence of scarce data.
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Asma Bensalah, Jialuo Chen, Alicia Fornes, Cristina Carmona_Duarte, Josep Llados and Miguel A. Ferrer. 2020. Towards Stroke Patients' Upper-limb Automatic Motor Assessment Using Smartwatches. International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare Applications.476–489.
Abstract: Assessing the physical condition in rehabilitation scenarios is a challenging problem, since it involves Human Activity Recognition (HAR) and kinematic analysis methods. In addition, the difficulties increase in unconstrained rehabilitation scenarios, which are much closer to the real use cases. In particular, our aim is to design an upper-limb assessment pipeline for stroke patients using smartwatches. We focus on the HAR task, as it is the first part of the assessing pipeline. Our main target is to automatically detect and recognize four key movements inspired by the Fugl-Meyer assessment scale, which are performed in both constrained and unconstrained scenarios. In addition to the application protocol and dataset, we propose two detection and classification baseline methods. We believe that the proposed framework, dataset and baseline results will serve to foster this research field.
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Manuel Carbonell, Pau Riba, Mauricio Villegas, Alicia Fornes and Josep Llados. 2020. Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction with Graph Neural Networks in Semi Structured Documents. 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition.
Abstract: The use of administrative documents to communicate and leave record of business information requires of methods
able to automatically extract and understand the content from
such documents in a robust and efficient way. In addition,
the semi-structured nature of these reports is specially suited
for the use of graph-based representations which are flexible
enough to adapt to the deformations from the different document
templates. Moreover, Graph Neural Networks provide the proper
methodology to learn relations among the data elements in
these documents. In this work we study the use of Graph
Neural Network architectures to tackle the problem of entity
recognition and relation extraction in semi-structured documents.
Our approach achieves state of the art results in the three
tasks involved in the process. Additionally, the experimentation
with two datasets of different nature demonstrates the good
generalization ability of our approach.
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Pau Riba, Andreas Fischer, Josep Llados and Alicia Fornes. 2020. Learning Graph Edit Distance by Graph NeuralNetworks.
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~\ie~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.
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Klara Janousckova, Jiri Matas, Lluis Gomez and Dimosthenis Karatzas. 2020. Text Recognition – Real World Data and Where to Find Them. 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition.4489–4496.
Abstract: We present a method for exploiting weakly annotated images to improve text extraction pipelines. The approach uses an arbitrary end-to-end text recognition system to obtain text region proposals and their, possibly erroneous, transcriptions. The method includes matching of imprecise transcriptions to weak annotations and an edit distance guided neighbourhood search. It produces nearly error-free, localised instances of scene text, which we treat as “pseudo ground truth” (PGT). The method is applied to two weakly-annotated datasets. Training with the extracted PGT consistently improves the accuracy of a state of the art recognition model, by 3.7% on average, across different benchmark datasets (image domains) and 24.5% on one of the weakly annotated datasets 1 1 Acknowledgements. The authors were supported by Czech Technical University student grant SGS20/171/0HK3/3TJ13, the MEYS VVV project CZ.02.1.01/0.010.0J16 019/0000765 Research Center for Informatics, the Spanish Research project TIN2017-89779-P and the CERCA Programme / Generalitat de Catalunya.
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Minesh Mathew, Ruben Tito, Dimosthenis Karatzas, R.Manmatha and C.V. Jawahar. 2020. Document Visual Question Answering Challenge 2020. 33rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition – Short paper.
Abstract: This paper presents results of Document Visual Question Answering Challenge organized as part of “Text and Documents in the Deep Learning Era” workshop, in CVPR 2020. The challenge introduces a new problem – Visual Question Answering on document images. The challenge comprised two tasks. The first task concerns with asking questions on a single document image. On the other hand, the second task is set as a retrieval task where the question is posed over a collection of images. For the task 1 a new dataset is introduced comprising 50,000 questions-answer(s) pairs defined over 12,767 document images. For task 2 another dataset has been created comprising 20 questions over 14,362 document images which share the same document template.
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David Aldavert. 2021. Efficient and Scalable Handwritten Word Spotting on Historical Documents using Bag of Visual Words. (Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey.)
Abstract: Word spotting can be defined as the pattern recognition tasked aimed at locating and retrieving a specific keyword within a document image collection without explicitly transcribing the whole corpus. Its use is particularly interesting when applied in scenarios where Optical Character Recognition performs poorly or can not be used at all. This thesis focuses on such a scenario, word spotting on historical handwritten documents that have been written by a single author or by multiple authors with a similar calligraphy.
This problem requires a visual signature that is robust to image artifacts, flexible to accommodate script variations and efficient to retrieve information in a rapid manner. For this, we have developed a set of word spotting methods that on their foundation use the well known Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) representation. This representation has gained popularity among the document image analysis community to characterize handwritten words
in an unsupervised manner. However, most approaches on this field rely on a basic BoVW configuration and disregard complex encoding and spatial representations. We determine which BoVW configurations provide the best performance boost to a spotting system.
Then, we extend the segmentation-based word spotting, where word candidates are given a priori, to segmentation-free spotting. The proposed approach seeds the document images with overlapping word location candidates and characterizes them with a BoVW signature. Retrieval is achieved comparing the query and candidate signatures and returning the locations that provide a higher consensus. This is a simple but powerful approach that requires a more compact signature than in a segmentation-based scenario. We first
project the BoVW signature into a reduced semantic topics space and then compress it further using Product Quantizers. The resulting signature only requires a few dozen bytes, allowing us to index thousands of pages on a common desktop computer. The final system still yields a performance comparable to the state-of-the-art despite all the information loss during the compression phases.
Afterwards, we also study how to combine different modalities of information in order to create a query-by-X spotting system where, words are indexed using an information modality and queries are retrieved using another. We consider three different information modalities: visual, textual and audio. Our proposal is to create a latent feature space where features which are semantically related are projected onto the same topics. Creating thus a new feature space where information from different modalities can be compared. Later, we consider the codebook generation and descriptor encoding problem. The codebooks used to encode the BoVW signatures are usually created using an unsupervised clustering algorithm and, they require to test multiple parameters to determine which configuration is best for a certain document collection. We propose a semantic clustering algorithm which allows to estimate the best parameter from data. Since gather annotated data is costly, we use synthetically generated word images. The resulting codebook is database agnostic, i. e. a codebook that yields a good performance on document collections that use the same script. We also propose the use of an additional codebook to approximate descriptors and reduce the descriptor encoding
complexity to sub-linear.
Finally, we focus on the problem of signatures dimensionality. We propose a new symbol probability signature where each bin represents the probability that a certain symbol is present a certain location of the word image. This signature is extremely compact and combined with compression techniques can represent word images with just a few bytes per signature.
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Lei Kang, Pau Riba, Mauricio Villegas, Alicia Fornes and Marçal Rusiñol. 2021. Candidate Fusion: Integrating Language Modelling into a Sequence-to-Sequence Handwritten Word Recognition Architecture. PR, 112, 107790.
Abstract: Sequence-to-sequence models have recently become very popular for tackling
handwritten word recognition problems. However, how to effectively integrate an external language model into such recognizer is still a challenging
problem. The main challenge faced when training a language model is to
deal with the language model corpus which is usually different to the one
used for training the handwritten word recognition system. Thus, the bias
between both word corpora leads to incorrectness on the transcriptions, providing similar or even worse performances on the recognition task. In this
work, we introduce Candidate Fusion, a novel way to integrate an external
language model to a sequence-to-sequence architecture. Moreover, it provides suggestions from an external language knowledge, as a new input to
the sequence-to-sequence recognizer. Hence, Candidate Fusion provides two
improvements. On the one hand, the sequence-to-sequence recognizer has
the flexibility not only to combine the information from itself and the language model, but also to choose the importance of the information provided
by the language model. On the other hand, the external language model
has the ability to adapt itself to the training corpus and even learn the
most commonly errors produced from the recognizer. Finally, by conducting
comprehensive experiments, the Candidate Fusion proves to outperform the
state-of-the-art language models for handwritten word recognition tasks.
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Arka Ujjal Dey, Suman Ghosh, Ernest Valveny and Gaurav Harit. 2021. Beyond Visual Semantics: Exploring the Role of Scene Text in Image Understanding. PRL, 149, 164–171.
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.
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