Abstract: A method for estimating the non-linear gamma transfer function of liquid–crystal displays (LCDs) without the need of a photometric measurement device was described by Xiao et al. (2011) [1]. It relies on observer’s judgments of visual luminance by presenting eight half-tone patterns with luminances from 1/9 to 8/9 of the maximum value of each colour channel. These half-tone patterns were distributed over the screen both over the vertical and horizontal viewing axes. We conducted a series of photometric and psychophysical measurements (consisting in the simultaneous presentation of half-tone patterns in each trial) to evaluate whether the angular dependency of the light generated by three different LCD technologies would bias the results of these gamma transfer function estimations. Our results show that there are significant differences between the gamma transfer functions measured and produced by observers at different viewing angles. We suggest appropriate modifications to the Xiao et al. paradigm to counterbalance these artefacts which also have the advantage of shortening the amount of time spent in collecting the psychophysical measurements.

Abstract: In this paper we present an efficient segmentation-free word spotting method, applied in the context of historical document collections, that follows the query-by-example paradigm. We use a patch-based framework where local patches are described by a bag-of-visual-words model powered by SIFT descriptors. By projecting the patch descriptors to a topic space with the latent semantic analysis technique and compressing the descriptors with the product quantization method, we are able to efficiently index the document information both in terms of memory and time. The proposed method is evaluated using four different collections of historical documents achieving good performances on both handwritten and typewritten scenarios. The yielded performances outperform the recent state-of-the-art keyword spotting approaches.