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.

Abstract: Despite the large amount of methods and applications of augmented reality, there is little homogenizatio n on the software platforms that support them. An exception may be the low level control software that is provided by some high profile vendors such as Qualcomm and Metaio. However, these provide fine grain modules for e.g. element tracking. We are more co ncerned on the application framework, that includes the control of the devices working together for the development of the AR experience. In this paper we describe the development of a software framework for AR setups. We concentrate on the modular design of the framework, but also on some hard problems such as the calibration stage, crucial for projection – based AR. The developed framework is suitable and has been tested in AR applications using camera – projector pairs, for both fixed and nomadic setups

Abstract: Many algorithms formulate graph matching as an optimization of an objective function of pairwise quantification of nodes and edges of two graphs to be matched. Pairwise measurements usually consider local attributes but disregard contextual information involved in graph structures. We address this issue by proposing contextual similarities between pairs of nodes. This is done by considering the tensor product graph (TPG) of two graphs to be matched, where each node is an ordered pair of nodes of the operand graphs. Contextual similarities between a pair of nodes are computed by accumulating weighted walks (normalized pairwise similarities) terminating at the corresponding paired node in TPG. Once the contextual similarities are obtained, we formulate subgraph matching as a node and edge selection problem in TPG. We use contextual similarities to construct an objective function and optimize it with a linear programming approach. Since random walk formulation through TPG takes into account higher order information, it is not a surprise that we obtain more reliable similarities and better discrimination among the nodes and edges. Experimental results shown on synthetic as well as real benchmarks illustrate that higher order contextual similarities increase discriminating power and allow one to find approximate solutions to the subgraph matching problem.