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Alicia Fornes, Volkmar Frinken, Andreas Fischer, Jon Almazan, G. Jackson and Horst Bunke. 2011. A Keyword Spotting Approach Using Blurred Shape Model-Based Descriptors. Proceedings of the 2011 Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing. ACM, 83–90.
Abstract: The automatic processing of handwritten historical documents is considered a hard problem in pattern recognition. In addition to the challenges given by modern handwritten data, a lack of training data as well as effects caused by the degradation of documents can be observed. In this scenario, keyword spotting arises to be a viable solution to make documents amenable for searching and browsing. For this task we propose the adaptation of shape descriptors used in symbol recognition. By treating each word image as a shape, it can be represented using the Blurred Shape Model and the De-formable Blurred Shape Model. Experiments on the George Washington database demonstrate that this approach is able to outperform the commonly used Dynamic Time Warping approach.
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Andreas Fischer, Volkmar Frinken, Alicia Fornes and Horst Bunke. 2011. Transcription Alignment of Latin Manuscripts Using Hidden Markov Models. Proceedings of the 2011 Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing. ACM, 29–36.
Abstract: Transcriptions of historical documents are a valuable source for extracting labeled handwriting images that can be used for training recognition systems. In this paper, we introduce the Saint Gall database that includes images as well as the transcription of a Latin manuscript from the 9th century written in Carolingian script. Although the available transcription is of high quality for a human reader, the spelling of the words is not accurate when compared with the handwriting image. Hence, the transcription poses several challenges for alignment regarding, e.g., line breaks, abbreviations, and capitalization. We propose an alignment system based on character Hidden Markov Models that can cope with these challenges and efficiently aligns complete document pages. On the Saint Gall database, we demonstrate that a considerable alignment accuracy can be achieved, even with weakly trained character models.
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Volkmar Frinken, Alicia Fornes, Josep Llados and Jean-Marc Ogier. 2012. Bidirectional Language Model for Handwriting Recognition. Structural, Syntactic, and Statistical Pattern Recognition, Joint IAPR International Workshop. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 611–619. (LNCS.)
Abstract: In order to improve the results of automatically recognized handwritten text, information about the language is commonly included in the recognition process. A common approach is to represent a text line as a sequence. It is processed in one direction and the language information via n-grams is directly included in the decoding. This approach, however, only uses context on one side to estimate a word’s probability. Therefore, we propose a bidirectional recognition in this paper, using distinct forward and a backward language models. By combining decoding hypotheses from both directions, we achieve a significant increase in recognition accuracy for the off-line writer independent handwriting recognition task. Both language models are of the same type and can be estimated on the same corpus. Hence, the increase in recognition accuracy comes without any additional need for training data or language modeling complexity.
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Volkmar Frinken, Andreas Fischer and Carlos David Martinez Hinarejos. 2013. Handwriting Recognition in Historical Documents using Very Large Vocabularies. 2nd International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing.67–72.
Abstract: Language models are used in automatic transcription system to resolve ambiguities. This is done by limiting the vocabulary of words that can be recognized as well as estimating the n-gram probability of the words in the given text. In the context of historical documents, a non-unified spelling and the limited amount of written text pose a substantial problem for the selection of the recognizable vocabulary as well as the computation of the word probabilities. In this paper we propose for the transcription of historical Spanish text to keep the corpus for the n-gram limited to a sample of the target text, but expand the vocabulary with words gathered from external resources. We analyze the performance of such a transcription system with different sizes of external vocabularies and demonstrate the applicability and the significant increase in recognition accuracy of using up to 300 thousand external words.
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Alicia Fornes, V.C.Kieu, M. Visani, N.Journet and Anjan Dutta. 2014. The ICDAR/GREC 2013 Music Scores Competition: Staff Removal. In B.Lamiroy and J.-M. Ogier, eds. Graphics Recognition. Current Trends and Challenges. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 207–220. (LNCS.)
Abstract: The first competition on music scores that was organized at ICDAR and GREC in 2011 awoke the interest of researchers, who participated in both staff removal and writer identification tasks. In this second edition, we focus on the staff removal task and simulate a real case scenario concerning old and degraded music scores. For this purpose, we have generated a new set of semi-synthetic images using two degradation models that we previously introduced: local noise and 3D distortions. In this extended paper we provide an extended description of the dataset, degradation models, evaluation metrics, the participant’s methods and the obtained results that could not be presented at ICDAR and GREC proceedings due to page limitations.
Keywords: Competition; Graphics recognition; Music scores; Writer identification; Staff removal
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David Fernandez, Josep Llados and Alicia Fornes. 2011. Handwritten Word Spotting in Old Manuscript Images Using a Pseudo-Structural Descriptor Organized in a Hash Structure. In Jordi Vitria, Joao Miguel Raposo and Mario Hernandez, eds. 5th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis.628–635.
Abstract: There are lots of historical handwritten documents with information that can be used for several studies and projects. The Document Image Analysis and Recognition community is interested in preserving these documents and extracting all the valuable information from them. Handwritten word-spotting is the pattern classification task which consists in detecting handwriting word images. In this work, we have used a query-by-example formalism: we have matched an input image with one or multiple images from handwritten documents to determine the distance that might indicate a correspondence. We have developed an approach based in characteristic Loci Features stored in a hash structure. Document images of the marriage licences of the Cathedral of Barcelona are used as the benchmarking database.
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David Fernandez, Josep Llados, Alicia Fornes and R.Manmatha. 2012. On Influence of Line Segmentation in Efficient Word Segmentation in Old Manuscripts. 13th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition.763–768.
Abstract: he objective of this work is to show the importance of a good line segmentation to obtain better results in the segmentation of words of historical documents. We have used the approach developed by Manmatha and Rothfeder [1] to segment words in old handwritten documents. In their work the lines of the documents are extracted using projections. In this work, we have developed an approach to segment lines more efficiently. The new line segmentation algorithm tackles with skewed, touching and noisy lines, so it is significantly improves word segmentation. Experiments using Spanish documents from the Marriages Database of the Barcelona Cathedral show that this approach reduces the error rate by more than 20%
Keywords: document image processing;handwritten character recognition;history;image segmentation;Spanish document;historical document;line segmentation;old handwritten document;old manuscript;word segmentation;Bifurcation;Dynamic programming;Handwriting recognition;Image segmentation;Measurement;Noise;Skeleton;Segmentation;document analysis;document and text processing;handwriting analysis;heuristics;path-finding
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David Fernandez, Josep Llados and Alicia Fornes. 2014. A graph-based approach for segmenting touching lines in historical handwritten documents. IJDAR, 17(3), 293–312.
Abstract: Text line segmentation in handwritten documents is an important task in the recognition of historical documents. Handwritten document images contain text lines with multiple orientations, touching and overlapping characters between consecutive text lines and different document structures, making line segmentation a difficult task. In this paper, we present a new approach for handwritten text line segmentation solving the problems of touching components, curvilinear text lines and horizontally overlapping components. The proposed algorithm formulates line segmentation as finding the central path in the area between two consecutive lines. This is solved as a graph traversal problem. A graph is constructed using the skeleton of the image. Then, a path-finding algorithm is used to find the optimum path between text lines. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on a comprehensive dataset consisting of five databases: ICDAR2009, ICDAR2013, UMD, the George Washington and the Barcelona Marriages Database. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art considering the different types and difficulties of the benchmarking data.
Keywords: Text line segmentation; Handwritten documents; Document image processing; Historical document analysis
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Alicia Fornes, Josep Llados, Joan Mas, Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora and Anna Cabre. 2014. A Bimodal Crowdsourcing Platform for Demographic Historical Manuscripts. Digital Access to Textual Cultural Heritage Conference.103–108.
Abstract: In this paper we present a crowdsourcing web-based application for extracting information from demographic handwritten document images. The proposed application integrates two points of view: the semantic information for demographic research, and the ground-truthing for document analysis research. Concretely, the application has the contents view, where the information is recorded into forms, and the labeling view, with the word labels for evaluating document analysis techniques. The crowdsourcing architecture allows to accelerate the information extraction (many users can work simultaneously), validate the information, and easily provide feedback to the users. We finally show how the proposed application can be extended to other kind of demographic historical manuscripts.
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Alicia Fornes, Josep Llados and Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora. 2020. Browsing of the Social Network of the Past: Information Extraction from Population Manuscript Images. Handwritten Historical Document Analysis, Recognition, and Retrieval – State of the Art and Future Trends. World Scientific.
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