Abstract: This article addresses the problems of word spotting and word recognition on images. In word spotting, the goal is to find all instances of a query word in a dataset of images. In recognition, the goal is to recognize the content of the word image, usually aided by a dictionary or lexicon. We describe an approach in which both word images and text strings are embedded in a common vectorial subspace. This is achieved by a combination of label embedding and attributes learning, and a common subspace regression. In this subspace, images and strings that represent the same word are close together, allowing one to cast recognition and retrieval tasks as a nearest neighbor problem. Contrary to most other existing methods, our representation has a fixed length, is low dimensional, and is very fast to compute and, especially, to compare. We test our approach on four public datasets of both handwritten documents and natural images showing results comparable or better than the state-of-the-art on spotting and recognition tasks.

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: An improved method for visual gamma correction is developed for LCD displays to increase the accuracy of digital colour reproduction. Rather than utilising a photometric measurement device, we use observ- ers’ visual luminance judgements for gamma correction. Eight half tone patterns were designed to gen- erate relative luminances from 1/9 to 8/9 for each colour channel. A psychophysical experiment was conducted on an LCD display to find the digital signals corresponding to each relative luminance by visually matching the half-tone background to a uniform colour patch. Both inter- and intra-observer vari- ability for the eight luminance matches in each channel were assessed and the luminance matches proved to be consistent across observers (DE00 < 3.5) and repeatable (DE00 < 2.2). Based on the individual observer judgements, the display opto-electronic transfer function (OETF) was estimated by using either a 3rd order polynomial regression or linear interpolation for each colour channel. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by predicting the CIE tristimulus values of a set of coloured patches (using the observer-based OETFs) and comparing them to the expected CIE tristimulus values (using the OETF obtained from spectro-radiometric luminance measurements). The resulting colour differences range from 2 to 4.6 DE00. We conclude that this observer-based method of visual gamma correction is useful to estimate the OETF for LCD displays. Its major advantage is that no particular functional relationship between digital inputs and luminance outputs has to be assumed.