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Emanuel Indermühle, Volkmar Frinken and Horst Bunke. 2012. Mode Detection in Online Handwritten Documents using BLSTM Neural Networks. 13th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition.302–307.
Abstract: Mode detection in online handwritten documents refers to the process of distinguishing different types of contents, such as text, formulas, diagrams, or tables, one from another. In this paper a new approach to mode detection is proposed that uses bidirectional long-short term memory (BLSTM) neural networks. The BLSTM neural network is a novel type of recursive neural network that has been successfully applied in speech and handwriting recognition. In this paper we show that it has the potential to significantly outperform traditional methods for mode detection, which are usually based on stroke classification. As a further advantage over previous approaches, the proposed system is trainable and does not rely on user-defined heuristics. Moreover, it can be easily adapted to new or additional types of modes by just providing the system with new training data.
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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work is to show the importance of a good line segmentation to obtain better results in the segmentation of words of historical documents.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Keywords: document image processing;handwritten character recognition;history;image segmentation;Spanish document;historical document;line segmentation;old handwritten document;old manuscript;word segmentation;Bifurcation;Dynamic programming;Handwriting recognition;Image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, Pau Riba, Alicia Fornes and Josep Llados. 2014. On the Influence of Key Point Encoding for Handwritten Word Spotting. 14th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition.476–481.
Abstract: In this paper we evaluate the influence of the selection of key points and the associated features in the performance of word spotting processes. In general, features can be extracted from a number of characteristic points like corners, contours, skeletons, maxima, minima, crossings, etc. A number of descriptors exist in the literature using different interest point detectors. But the intrinsic variability of handwriting vary strongly on the performance if the interest points are not stable enough. In this paper, we analyze the performance of different descriptors for local interest points. As benchmarking dataset we have used the Barcelona Marriage Database that contains handwritten records of marriages over five centuries.
Keywords: Local descriptors; Interest points; Handwritten documents; Word spotting; Historical document analysis
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Pau Riba, Jon Almazan, Alicia Fornes, David Fernandez, Ernest Valveny and Josep Llados. 2014. e-Crowds: a mobile platform for browsing and searching in historical demographyrelated manuscripts. 14th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition.228–233.
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.
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Arnau Baro, Pau Riba and Alicia Fornes. 2016. Towards the recognition of compound music notes in handwritten music scores. 15th international conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition.
Abstract: The recognition of handwritten music scores still remains an open problem. The existing approaches can only deal with very simple handwritten scores mainly because of the variability in the handwriting style and the variability in the composition of groups of music notes (i.e. compound music notes). In this work we focus on this second problem and propose a method based on perceptual grouping for the recognition of compound music notes. Our method has been tested using several handwritten music scores of the CVC-MUSCIMA database and compared with a commercial Optical Music Recognition (OMR) software. Given that our method is learning-free, the obtained results are promising.
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Veronica Romero, Alicia Fornes, Enrique Vidal and Joan Andreu Sanchez. 2016. Using the MGGI Methodology for Category-based Language Modeling in Handwritten Marriage Licenses Books. 15th international conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition.
Abstract: Handwritten marriage licenses books have been used for centuries by ecclesiastical and secular institutions to register marriages. The information contained in these historical documents is useful for demography studies and
genealogical research, among others. Despite the generally simple structure of the text in these documents, automatic transcription and semantic information extraction is difficult due to the distinct and evolutionary vocabulary, which is composed mainly of proper names that change along the time. In previous
works we studied the use of category-based language models to both improve the automatic transcription accuracy and make easier the extraction of semantic information. Here we analyze the main causes of the semantic errors observed in previous results and apply a Grammatical Inference technique known as MGGI to improve the semantic accuracy of the language model obtained. Using this language model, full handwritten text recognition experiments have been carried out, with results supporting the interest of the proposed approach.
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Jialuo Chen, Pau Riba, Alicia Fornes, Juan Mas, Josep Llados and Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora. 2018. Word-Hunter: A Gamesourcing Experience to Validate the Transcription of Historical Manuscripts. 16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition.528–533.
Abstract: Nowadays, there are still many handwritten historical documents in archives waiting to be transcribed and indexed. Since manual transcription is tedious and time consuming, the automatic transcription seems the path to follow. However, the performance of current handwriting recognition techniques is not perfect, so a manual validation is mandatory. Crowdsourcing is a good strategy for manual validation, however it is a tedious task. In this paper we analyze experiences based in gamification
in order to propose and design a gamesourcing framework that increases the interest of users. Then, we describe and analyze our experience when validating the automatic transcription using the gamesourcing application. Moreover, thanks to the combination of clustering and handwriting recognition techniques, we can speed up the validation while maintaining the performance.
Keywords: Crowdsourcing; Gamification; Handwritten documents; Performance evaluation
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Arnau Baro, Alicia Fornes and Carles Badal. 2020. Handwritten Historical Music Recognition by Sequence-to-Sequence with Attention Mechanism. 17th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition.
Abstract: Despite decades of research in Optical Music Recognition (OMR), the recognition of old handwritten music scores remains a challenge because of the variabilities in the handwriting styles, paper degradation, lack of standard notation, etc. Therefore, the research in OMR systems adapted to the particularities of old manuscripts is crucial to accelerate the conversion of music scores existing in archives into digital libraries, fostering the dissemination and preservation of our music heritage. In this paper we explore the adaptation of sequence-to-sequence models with attention mechanism (used in translation and handwritten text recognition) and the generation of specific synthetic data for recognizing old music scores. The experimental validation demonstrates that our approach is promising, especially when compared with long short-term memory neural networks.
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Lei Kang, Pau Riba, Marçal Rusiñol, Alicia Fornes and Mauricio Villegas. 2020. Distilling Content from Style for Handwritten Word Recognition. 17th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition.
Abstract: Despite the latest transcription accuracies reached using deep neural network architectures, handwritten text recognition still remains a challenging problem, mainly because of the large inter-writer style variability. Both augmenting the training set with artificial samples using synthetic fonts, and writer adaptation techniques have been proposed to yield more generic approaches aimed at dodging style unevenness. In this work, we take a step closer to learn style independent features from handwritten word images. We propose a novel method that is able to disentangle the content and style aspects of input images by jointly optimizing a generative process and a handwritten
word recognizer. The generator is aimed at transferring writing style features from one sample to another in an image-to-image translation approach, thus leading to a learned content-centric features that shall be independent to writing style attributes.
Our proposed recognition model is able then to leverage such writer-agnostic features to reach better recognition performances. We advance over prior training strategies and demonstrate with qualitative and quantitative evaluations the performance of both
the generative process and the recognition efficiency in the IAM dataset.
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Giuseppe De Gregorio and 6 others. 2022. A Few Shot Multi-representation Approach for N-Gram Spotting in Historical Manuscripts. Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition. International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR2022).3–12. (LNCS.)
Abstract: Despite recent advances in automatic text recognition, the performance remains moderate when it comes to historical manuscripts. This is mainly because of the scarcity of available labelled data to train the data-hungry Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) models. The Keyword Spotting System (KWS) provides a valid alternative to HTR due to the reduction in error rate, but it is usually limited to a closed reference vocabulary. In this paper, we propose a few-shot learning paradigm for spotting sequences of a few characters (N-gram) that requires a small amount of labelled training data. We exhibit that recognition of important n-grams could reduce the system’s dependency on vocabulary. In this case, an out-of-vocabulary (OOV) word in an input handwritten line image could be a sequence of n-grams that belong to the lexicon. An extensive experimental evaluation of our proposed multi-representation approach was carried out on a subset of Bentham’s historical manuscript collections to obtain some really promising results in this direction.
Keywords: N-gram spotting; Few-shot learning; Multimodal understanding; Historical handwritten collections
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