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N. Serrano, L. Tarazon, D. Perez, Oriol Ramos Terrades and S. Juan. 2010. The GIDOC Prototype. 10th International Workshop on Pattern Recognition in Information Systems.82–89.
Abstract: Transcription of handwritten text in (old) documents is an important, time-consuming task for digital libraries. It might be carried out by first processing all document images off-line, and then manually supervising system transcriptions to edit incorrect parts. However, current techniques for automatic page layout analysis, text line detection and handwriting recognition are still far from perfect, and thus post-editing system output is not clearly better than simply ignoring it.
A more effective approach to transcribe old text documents is to follow an interactive- predictive paradigm in which both, the system is guided by the user, and the user is assisted by the system to complete the transcription task as efficiently as possible. Following this approach, a system prototype called GIDOC (Gimp-based Interactive transcription of old text DOCuments) has been developed to provide user-friendly, integrated support for interactive-predictive layout analysis, line detection and handwriting transcription.
GIDOC is designed to work with (large) collections of homogeneous documents, that is, of similar structure and writing styles. They are annotated sequentially, by (par- tially) supervising hypotheses drawn from statistical models that are constantly updated with an increasing number of available annotated documents. And this is done at different annotation levels. For instance, at the level of page layout analysis, GIDOC uses a novel text block detection method in which conventional, memoryless techniques are improved with a “history” model of text block positions. Similarly, at the level of text line image transcription, GIDOC includes a handwriting recognizer which is steadily improved with a growing number of (partially) supervised transcriptions.
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Volkmar Frinken, Andreas Fischer, Horst Bunke and Alicia Fornes. 2011. Co-training for Handwritten Word Recognition. 11th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.314–318.
Abstract: To cope with the tremendous variations of writing styles encountered between different individuals, unconstrained automatic handwriting recognition systems need to be trained on large sets of labeled data. Traditionally, the training data has to be labeled manually, which is a laborious and costly process. Semi-supervised learning techniques offer methods to utilize unlabeled data, which can be obtained cheaply in large amounts in order, to reduce the need for labeled data. In this paper, we propose the use of Co-Training for improving the recognition accuracy of two weakly trained handwriting recognition systems. The first one is based on Recurrent Neural Networks while the second one is based on Hidden Markov Models. On the IAM off-line handwriting database we demonstrate a significant increase of the recognition accuracy can be achieved with Co-Training for single word recognition.
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Agnes Borras and Josep Llados. 2007. Similarity-Based Object Retrieval Using Appearance and Geometric Feature Combination. 3rd Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (IbPRIA 2007), J. Marti et al. (Eds.) LNCS 4477:113–120.33–39.
Abstract: This work presents a content-based image retrieval system of general purpose that deals with cluttered scenes containing a given query object. The system is flexible enough to handle with a single image of an object despite its rotation, translation and scale variations. The image content is divided in parts that are described with a combination of features based on geometrical and color properties. The idea behind the feature combination is to benefit from a fuzzy similarity computation that provides robustness and tolerance to the retrieval process. The features can be independently computed and the image parts can be easily indexed by using a table structure on every feature value. Finally a process inspired in the alignment strategies is used to check the coherence of the object parts found in a scene. Our work presents a system of easy implementation that uses an open set of features and can suit a wide variety of applications.
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Agnes Borras, Francesc Tous, Josep Llados and Maria Vanrell. 2003. High-Level Clothes Description Based on Color-Texture and Structural Features. Lecture Notes in Computer Science.108–116.
Abstract: This work is a part of a surveillance system where content- based image retrieval is done in terms of people appearance. Given an image of a person, our work provides an automatic description of his clothing according to the colour, texture and structural composition of its garments. We present a two-stage process composed by image segmentation and a region-based interpretation. We segment an image by modelling it due to an attributed graph and applying a hybrid method that follows a split-and-merge strategy. We propose the interpretation of five cloth combinations that are modelled in a graph structure in terms of region features. The interpretation is viewed as a graph matching with an associated cost between the segmentation and the cloth models. Fi- nally, we have tested the process with a ground-truth of one hundred images.
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Pau Riba, Sounak Dey, Ali Furkan Biten and Josep Llados. 2021. Localizing Infinity-shaped fishes: Sketch-guided object localization in the wild.
Abstract: This work investigates the problem of sketch-guided object localization (SGOL), where human sketches are used as queries to conduct the object localization in natural images. In this cross-modal setting, we first contribute with a tough-to-beat baseline that without any specific SGOL training is able to outperform the previous works on a fixed set of classes. The baseline is useful to analyze the performance of SGOL approaches based on available simple yet powerful methods. We advance prior arts by proposing a sketch-conditioned DETR (DEtection TRansformer) architecture which avoids a hard classification and alleviates the domain gap between sketches and images to localize object instances. Although the main goal of SGOL is focused on object detection, we explored its natural extension to sketch-guided instance segmentation. This novel task allows to move towards identifying the objects at pixel level, which is of key importance in several applications. We experimentally demonstrate that our model and its variants significantly advance over previous state-of-the-art results. All training and testing code of our model will be released to facilitate future researchhttps://github.com/priba/sgol_wild.
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Minesh Mathew, Lluis Gomez, Dimosthenis Karatzas and C.V. Jawahar. 2021. Asking questions on handwritten document collections. IJDAR, 24, 235–249.
Abstract: This work addresses the problem of Question Answering (QA) on handwritten document collections. Unlike typical QA and Visual Question Answering (VQA) formulations where the answer is a short text, we aim to locate a document snippet where the answer lies. The proposed approach works without recognizing the text in the documents. We argue that the recognition-free approach is suitable for handwritten documents and historical collections where robust text recognition is often difficult. At the same time, for human users, document image snippets containing answers act as a valid alternative to textual answers. The proposed approach uses an off-the-shelf deep embedding network which can project both textual words and word images into a common sub-space. This embedding bridges the textual and visual domains and helps us retrieve document snippets that potentially answer a question. We evaluate results of the proposed approach on two new datasets: (i) HW-SQuAD: a synthetic, handwritten document image counterpart of SQuAD1.0 dataset and (ii) BenthamQA: a smaller set of QA pairs defined on documents from the popular Bentham manuscripts collection. We also present a thorough analysis of the proposed recognition-free approach compared to a recognition-based approach which uses text recognized from the images using an OCR. Datasets presented in this work are available to download at docvqa.org.
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Sounak Dey. 2020. Mapping between Images and Conceptual Spaces: Sketch-based Image Retrieval. (Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey.)
Abstract: This thesis presents several contributions to the literature of sketch based image retrieval (SBIR). In SBIR the first challenge we face is how to map two different domains to common space for effective retrieval of images, while tackling the different levels of abstraction people use to express their notion of objects around while sketching. To this extent we first propose a cross-modal learning framework that maps both sketches and text into a joint embedding space invariant to depictive style, while preserving semantics. Then we have also investigated different query types possible to encompass people's dilema in sketching certain world objects. For this we propose an approach for multi-modal image retrieval in multi-labelled images. A multi-modal deep network architecture is formulated to jointly model sketches and text as input query modalities into a common embedding space, which is then further aligned with the image feature space. This permits encoding the object-based features and its alignment with the query irrespective of the availability of the co-occurrence of different objects in the training set.
Finally, we explore the problem of zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR), where human sketches are used as queries to conduct retrieval of photos from unseen categories. We importantly advance prior arts by proposing a novel ZS-SBIR scenario that represents a firm step forward in its practical application. The new setting uniquely recognises two important yet often neglected challenges of practical ZS-SBIR, (i) the large domain gap between amateur sketch and photo, and (ii) the necessity for moving towards large-scale retrieval. We first contribute to the community a novel ZS-SBIR dataset, QuickDraw-Extended. We also in this dissertation pave the path to the future direction of research in this domain.
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Lluis Gomez. 2016. Exploiting Similarity Hierarchies for Multi-script Scene Text Understanding. (Ph.D. thesis, .)
Abstract: This thesis addresses the problem of automatic scene text understanding in unconstrained conditions. In particular, we tackle the tasks of multi-language and arbitrary-oriented text detection, tracking, and script identification in natural scenes.
For this we have developed a set of generic methods that build on top of the basic observation that text has always certain key visual and structural characteristics that are independent of the language or script in which it is written. Text instances in any
language or script are always formed as groups of similar atomic parts, being them either individual characters, small stroke parts, or even whole words in the case of cursive text. This holistic (sumof-parts) and recursive perspective has lead us to explore different variants of the “segmentation and grouping” paradigm of computer vision.
Scene text detection methodologies are usually based in classification of individual regions or patches, using a priory knowledge for a given script or language. Human perception of text, on the other hand, is based on perceptual organization through which
text emerges as a perceptually significant group of atomic objects.
In this thesis, we argue that the text detection problem must be posed as the detection of meaningful groups of regions. We address the problem of text detection in natural scenes from a hierarchical perspective, making explicit use of the recursive nature of text, aiming directly to the detection of region groupings corresponding to text within a hierarchy produced by an agglomerative similarity clustering process over individual regions. We propose an optimal way to construct such an hierarchy introducing a feature space designed to produce text group hypothese with high recall and a novel stopping rule combining a discriminative classifier and a probabilistic measure of group meaningfulness based in perceptual organization. Within this generic framework, we design a text-specific object proposals algorithm that, contrary to existing generic object proposals methods, aims directly to the detection of text regions groupings. For this, we abandon the rigid definition of “what is text” of traditional specialized text detectors, and move towards more fuzzy perspective of grouping-based object proposals methods.
Then, we present a hybrid algorithm for detection and tracking of scene text where the notion of region groupings plays also a central role. By leveraging the structural arrangement of text group components between consecutive frames we can improve
the overall tracking performance of the system.
Finally, since our generic detection framework is inherently designed for multi-language environments, we focus on the problem of script identification in order to build a multi-language end-toend reading system. Facing this problem with state of the art CNN classifiers is not straightforward, as they fail to address a key
characteristic of scene text instances: their extremely variable aspect ratio. Instead of resizing input images to a fixed size as in the typical use of holistic CNN classifiers, we propose a patch-based classification framework in order to preserve discriminative parts of the image that are characteristic of its class. We describe a novel method based on the use of ensembles of conjoined networks to jointly learn discriminative stroke-parts representations and their relative importance in a patch-based classification scheme.
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Dimosthenis Karatzas and 9 others. 2013. ICDAR 2013 Robust Reading Competition. 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.1484–1493.
Abstract: This report presents the final results of the ICDAR 2013 Robust Reading Competition. The competition is structured in three Challenges addressing text extraction in different application domains, namely born-digital images, real scene images and real-scene videos. The Challenges are organised around specific tasks covering text localisation, text segmentation and word recognition. The competition took place in the first quarter of 2013, and received a total of 42 submissions over the different tasks offered. This report describes the datasets and ground truth specification, details the performance evaluation protocols used and presents the final results along with a brief summary of the participating methods.
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Alicia Fornes and 11 others. 2022. The RPM3D Project: 3D Kinematics for Remote Patient Monitoring. Intertwining Graphonomics with Human Movements. 20th International Conference of the International Graphonomics Society, IGS 2022.217–226. (LNCS.)
Abstract: This project explores the feasibility of remote patient monitoring based on the analysis of 3D movements captured with smartwatches. We base our analysis on the Kinematic Theory of Rapid Human Movement. We have validated our research in a real case scenario for stroke rehabilitation at the Guttmann Institute (https://www.guttmann.com/en/) (neurorehabilitation hospital), showing promising results. Our work could have a great impact in remote healthcare applications, improving the medical efficiency and reducing the healthcare costs. Future steps include more clinical validation, developing multi-modal analysis architectures (analysing data from sensors, images, audio, etc.), and exploring the application of our technology to monitor other neurodegenerative diseases.
Keywords: Healthcare applications; Kinematic; Theory of Rapid Human Movements; Human activity recognition; Stroke rehabilitation; 3D kinematics
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