Abstract: This paper presents a supervised subspace learning method called Kernel Generalized Discriminative Common Vectors (KGDCV), as a novel extension of the known Discriminative Common Vectors method with Kernels. Our method combines the advantages of kernel methods to model complex data and solve nonlinear
problems with moderate computational complexity, with the better generalization properties of generalized approaches for large dimensional data. These attractive combination makes KGDCV specially suited for feature extraction and classification in computer vision, image processing and pattern recognition applications. Two different approaches to this generalization are proposed, a first one based on the kernel trick (KT) and a second one based on the nonlinear projection trick (NPT) for even higher efficiency. Both methodologies
have been validated on four different image datasets containing faces, objects and handwritten digits, and compared against well known non-linear state-of-art methods. Results show better discriminant properties than other generalized approaches both linear or kernel. In addition, the KGDCV-NPT approach presents a considerable computational gain, without compromising the accuracy of the model.

Abstract: This paper presents a prototype system running on portable devices for browsing and word searching through historical handwritten document collections. The platform adapts the paradigm of eBook reading, where the narrative is not necessarily sequential, but centered on the user actions. The novelty is to replace digitally born books by digitized historical manuscripts of marriage licenses, so document analysis tasks are required in the browser. With an active reading paradigm, the user can cast queries of people names, so he/she can implicitly follow genealogical links. In addition, the system allows combined searches: the user can refine a search by adding more words to search. As a second contribution, the retrieval functionality involves as a core technology a word spotting module with an unified approach, which allows combined query searches, and also two input modalities: query-by-example, and query-by-string.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel method for date estimation of historical photographs from archival sources. The main contribution is to formulate the date estimation as a retrieval task, where given a query, the retrieved images are ranked in terms of the estimated date similarity. The closer are their embedded representations the closer are their dates. Contrary to the traditional models that design a neural network that learns a classifier or a regressor, we propose a learning objective based on the nDCG ranking metric. We have experimentally evaluated the performance of the method in two different tasks: date estimation and date-sensitive image retrieval, using the DEW public database, overcoming the baseline methods.

Abstract: This paper presents a new model for the task of scene text visual question answering. In this task questions about a given image can only be answered by reading and understanding scene text. Current state of the art models for this task make use of a dual attention mechanism in which one attention module attends to visual features while the other attends to textual features. A possible issue with this is that it makes difficult for the model to reason jointly about both modalities. To fix this problem we propose a new model that is based on an single attention mechanism that attends to multi-modal features conditioned to the question. The output weights of this attention module over a grid of multi-modal spatial features are interpreted as the probability that a certain spatial location of the image contains the answer text to the given question. Our experiments demonstrate competitive performance in two standard datasets with a model that is faster than previous methods at inference time. Furthermore, we also provide a novel analysis of the ST-VQA dataset based on a human performance study. Supplementary material, code, and data is made available through this link.

Abstract: This paper presents a methodology for shape recognition that focuses on dealing with the difficult problem of large deformations. The proposed methodology consists in a novel feature extraction technique, which uses a non-rigid representation adaptable to the shape. This technique employs a deformable grid based on the computation of geometrical centroids that follows a region partitioning algorithm. Then, a feature vector is extracted by computing pixel density measures around these geometrical centroids. The result is a shape descriptor that adapts its representation to the given shape and encodes the pixel density distribution. The validity of the method when dealing with large deformations has been experimentally shown over datasets composed of handwritten shapes. It has been applied to signature verification and shape recognition tasks demonstrating high accuracy and low computational cost.