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Juan Ignacio Toledo, Manuel Carbonell, Alicia Fornes, & Josep Llados. (2019). Information Extraction from Historical Handwritten Document Images with a Context-aware Neural Model. PR - Pattern Recognition, 86, 27–36.
Abstract: Many historical manuscripts that hold trustworthy memories of the past societies contain information organized in a structured layout (e.g. census, birth or marriage records). The precious information stored in these documents cannot be effectively used nor accessed without costly annotation efforts. The transcription driven by the semantic categories of words is crucial for the subsequent access. In this paper we describe an approach to extract information from structured historical handwritten text images and build a knowledge representation for the extraction of meaning out of historical data. The method extracts information, such as named entities, without the need of an intermediate transcription step, thanks to the incorporation of context information through language models. Our system has two variants, the first one is based on bigrams, whereas the second one is based on recurrent neural networks. Concretely, our second architecture integrates a Convolutional Neural Network to model visual information from word images together with a Bidirecitonal Long Short Term Memory network to model the relation among the words. This integrated sequential approach is able to extract more information than just the semantic category (e.g. a semantic category can be associated to a person in a record). Our system is generic, it deals with out-of-vocabulary words by design, and it can be applied to structured handwritten texts from different domains. The method has been validated with the ICDAR IEHHR competition protocol, outperforming the existing approaches.
Keywords: Document image analysis; Handwritten documents; Named entity recognition; Deep neural networks
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Sergio Escalera, Alicia Fornes, O. Pujol, Petia Radeva, Gemma Sanchez, & Josep Llados. (2009). Blurred Shape Model for Binary and Grey-level Symbol Recognition. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 30(15), 1424–1433.
Abstract: Many symbol recognition problems require the use of robust descriptors in order to obtain rich information of the data. However, the research of a good descriptor is still an open issue due to the high variability of symbols appearance. Rotation, partial occlusions, elastic deformations, intra-class and inter-class variations, or high variability among symbols due to different writing styles, are just a few problems. In this paper, we introduce a symbol shape description to deal with the changes in appearance that these types of symbols suffer. The shape of the symbol is aligned based on principal components to make the recognition invariant to rotation and reflection. Then, we present the Blurred Shape Model descriptor (BSM), where new features encode the probability of appearance of each pixel that outlines the symbols shape. Moreover, we include the new descriptor in a system to deal with multi-class symbol categorization problems. Adaboost is used to train the binary classifiers, learning the BSM features that better split symbol classes. Then, the binary problems are embedded in an Error-Correcting Output Codes framework (ECOC) to deal with the multi-class case. The methodology is evaluated on different synthetic and real data sets. State-of-the-art descriptors and classifiers are compared, showing the robustness and better performance of the present scheme to classify symbols with high variability of appearance.
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Miquel Ferrer, Ernest Valveny, & F. Serratosa. (2009). Median graph: A new exact algorithm using a distance based on the maximum common subgraph. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 30(5), 579–588.
Abstract: Median graphs have been presented as a useful tool for capturing the essential information of a set of graphs. Nevertheless, computation of optimal solutions is a very hard problem. In this work we present a new and more efficient optimal algorithm for the median graph computation. With the use of a particular cost function that permits the definition of the graph edit distance in terms of the maximum common subgraph, and a prediction function in the backtracking algorithm, we reduce the size of the search space, avoiding the evaluation of a great amount of states and still obtaining the exact median. We present a set of experiments comparing our new algorithm against the previous existing exact algorithm using synthetic data. In addition, we present the first application of the exact median graph computation to real data and we compare the results against an approximate algorithm based on genetic search. These experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the previous existing exact algorithm and in addition show the potential applicability of the exact solutions to real problems.
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M. Visani, Oriol Ramos Terrades, & Salvatore Tabbone. (2011). A Protocol to Characterize the Descriptive Power and the Complementarity of Shape Descriptors. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 14(1), 87–100.
Abstract: Most document analysis applications rely on the extraction of shape descriptors, which may be grouped into different categories, each category having its own advantages and drawbacks (O.R. Terrades et al. in Proceedings of ICDAR’07, pp. 227–231, 2007). In order to improve the richness of their description, many authors choose to combine multiple descriptors. Yet, most of the authors who propose a new descriptor content themselves with comparing its performance to the performance of a set of single state-of-the-art descriptors in a specific applicative context (e.g. symbol recognition, symbol spotting...). This results in a proliferation of the shape descriptors proposed in the literature. In this article, we propose an innovative protocol, the originality of which is to be as independent of the final application as possible and which relies on new quantitative and qualitative measures. We introduce two types of measures: while the measures of the first type are intended to characterize the descriptive power (in terms of uniqueness, distinctiveness and robustness towards noise) of a descriptor, the second type of measures characterizes the complementarity between multiple descriptors. Characterizing upstream the complementarity of shape descriptors is an alternative to the usual approach where the descriptors to be combined are selected by trial and error, considering the performance characteristics of the overall system. To illustrate the contribution of this protocol, we performed experimental studies using a set of descriptors and a set of symbols which are widely used by the community namely ART and SC descriptors and the GREC 2003 database.
Keywords: Document analysis; Shape descriptors; Symbol description; Performance characterization; Complementarity analysis
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Lluis Gomez, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2017). TextProposals: a Text‐specific Selective Search Algorithm for Word Spotting in the Wild. PR - Pattern Recognition, 70, 60–74.
Abstract: Motivated by the success of powerful while expensive techniques to recognize words in a holistic way (Goel et al., 2013; Almazán et al., 2014; Jaderberg et al., 2016) object proposals techniques emerge as an alternative to the traditional text detectors. In this paper we introduce a novel object proposals method that is specifically designed for text. We rely on a similarity based region grouping algorithm that generates a hierarchy of word hypotheses. Over the nodes of this hierarchy it is possible to apply a holistic word recognition method in an efficient way.
Our experiments demonstrate that the presented method is superior in its ability of producing good quality word proposals when compared with class-independent algorithms. We show impressive recall rates with a few thousand proposals in different standard benchmarks, including focused or incidental text datasets, and multi-language scenarios. Moreover, the combination of our object proposals with existing whole-word recognizers (Almazán et al., 2014; Jaderberg et al., 2016) shows competitive performance in end-to-end word spotting, and, in some benchmarks, outperforms previously published results. Concretely, in the challenging ICDAR2015 Incidental Text dataset, we overcome in more than 10% F-score the best-performing method in the last ICDAR Robust Reading Competition (Karatzas, 2015). Source code of the complete end-to-end system is available at https://github.com/lluisgomez/TextProposals.
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