Abstract: Images with visual and scene text content are ubiquitous in everyday life. However, current image interpretation systems are mostly limited to using only the visual features, neglecting to leverage the scene text content. In this paper, we propose to jointly use scene text and visual channels for robust semantic interpretation of images. We do not only extract and encode visual and scene text cues, but also model their interplay to generate a contextual joint embedding with richer semantics. The contextual embedding thus generated is applied to retrieval and classification tasks on multimedia images, with scene text content, to demonstrate its effectiveness. In the retrieval framework, we augment our learned text-visual semantic representation with scene text cues, to mitigate vocabulary misses that may have occurred during the semantic embedding. To deal with irrelevant or erroneous recognition of scene text, we also apply query-based attention to our text channel. We show how the multi-channel approach, involving visual semantics and scene text, improves upon state of the art.

Abstract: Nowadays, it is common in Historical Demography the use of individual-level data as a consequence of a predominant life-course approach for the understanding of the demographic behaviour, family transition, mobility, etc. Advanced record linkage is key since it allows increasing the data complexity and its volume to be analyzed. However, current methods are constrained to link data from the same kind of sources. Knowledge graph are flexible semantic representations, which allow to encode data variability and semantic relations in a structured manner.
In this paper we propose the use of knowledge graph methods to tackle record linkage tasks. The proposed method, named WERL, takes advantage of the main knowledge graph properties and learns embedding vectors to encode census information. These embeddings are properly weighted to maximize the record linkage performance. We have evaluated this method on benchmark data sets and we have compared it to related methods with stimulating and satisfactory results.

Abstract: From its early stages, the community of Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision has considered the importance of leveraging the structural information when understanding images. Usually, graphs have been proposed as a suitable model to represent this kind of information due to their flexibility and representational power able to codify both, the components, objects, or entities and their pairwise relationship. Even though graphs have been successfully applied to a huge variety of tasks, as a result of their symbolic and relational nature, graphs have always suffered from some limitations compared to statistical approaches. Indeed, some trivial mathematical operations do not have an equivalence in the graph domain. For instance, in the core of many pattern recognition applications, there is a need to compare two objects. This operation, which is trivial when considering feature vectors defined in \(\mathbb{R}^n\), is not properly defined for graphs.

In this thesis, we have investigated the importance of the structural information from two perspectives, the traditional graph-based methods and the new advances on Geometric Deep Learning. On the one hand, we explore the problem of defining a graph representation and how to deal with it on a large scale and noisy scenario. On the other hand, Graph Neural Networks are proposed to first redefine a Graph Edit Distance methodologies as a metric learning problem, and second, to apply them in a real use case scenario for the detection of repetitive patterns which define tables in invoice documents. As experimental framework, we have validated the different methodological contributions in the domain of Document Image Analysis and Recognition.

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.