Abstract: The amount of digitized legacy documents has been rising dramatically over the last years due mainly to the increasing number of on-line digital libraries publishing this kind of documents, waiting to be classified and finally transcribed into a textual electronic format (such as ASCII or PDF). Nevertheless, most of the available fully-automatic applications addressing this task are far from being perfect and heavy and inefficient human intervention is often required to check and correct the results of such systems. In contrast, multimodal interactive-predictive approaches may allow the users to participate in the process helping the system to improve the overall performance. With this in mind, two sets of recent advances are introduced in this work: a novel interactive method for text block detection and two multimodal interactive handwritten text transcription systems which use active learning and interactive-predictive technologies in the recognition process.

Abstract: The aim of writer identification is determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of writers. In this paper we present a system for writer identification in old handwritten music scores. Even though an important amount of compositions contains handwritten text in the music scores, the aim of our work is to use only music notation to determine the author. The steps of the system proposed are the following. First of all, the music sheet is preprocessed and normalized for obtaining a single binarized music line, without the staff lines. Afterwards, 100 features are extracted for every music line, which are subsequently used in a k-NN classifier that compares every feature vector with prototypes stored in a database. By applying feature selection and extraction methods on the original feature set, the performance is increased. The proposed method has been tested on a database of old music scores from the 17th to 19th centuries, achieving a recognition rate of about 95%.

Abstract: The adaptation capability to a wide range of domains is crucial for scene text spotting models when deployed to real-world conditions. However, existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches usually incorporate scene text detection and recognition simply by pretraining on natural scene text datasets, which do not directly exploit the intermediate feature representations between multiple domains. Here, we investigate the problem of domain-adaptive scene text spotting, i.e., training a model on multi-domain source data such that it can directly adapt to target domains rather than being specialized for a specific domain or scenario. Further, we investigate a transformer baseline called Swin-TESTR to focus on solving scene-text spotting for both regular and arbitrary-shaped scene text along with an exhaustive evaluation. The results clearly demonstrate the potential of intermediate representations to achieve significant performance on text spotting benchmarks across multiple domains (e.g. language, synth-to-real, and documents). both in terms of accuracy and efficiency.

Abstract: The extraction of relevant information from historical handwritten document collections is one of the key steps in order to make these manuscripts available for access and searches. In this competition, the goal is to detect the named entities and assign each of them a semantic category, and therefore, to simulate the filling in of a knowledge database. This paper describes the dataset, the tasks, the evaluation metrics, the participants methods and the results.

Abstract: Text watermark detection in video images is challenging because text watermark characteristics are different from caption and scene texts in the video images. Developing a successful model for detecting text watermark, caption, and scene texts is an open challenge. This study aims at developing a new Deep End-to-End model for Text Watermark Detection (TWD), caption and scene text in video images. To standardize non-uniform contrast, quality, and resolution, we explore the U-Net3+ model for enhancing poor quality text without affecting high-quality text. Similarly, to address the challenges of arbitrary orientation, text shapes and complex background, we explore Stacked Hourglass Encoded Fourier Contour Embedding Network (SFCENet) by feeding the output of the U-Net3+ model as input. Furthermore, the proposed work integrates enhancement and detection models as an end-to-end model for detecting multi-type text in video images. To validate the proposed model, we create our own dataset (named TW-866), which provides video images containing text watermark, caption (subtitles), as well as scene text. The proposed model is also evaluated on standard natural scene text detection datasets, namely, ICDAR 2019 MLT, CTW1500, Total-Text, and DAST1500. The results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods. This is the first work on text watermark detection in video images to the best of our knowledge