Abstract: The purpose of this study was to assess whether age-related chromatic sensitivity changes are associated with corresponding changes in hue perception in a large sample of colour-normal observers over a wide age range (n = 185; age range: 18-75 years). In these observers we determined both the sensitivity along the protan, deutan and tritan line; and settings for the four unique hues, from which the characteristics of the higher-order colour mechanisms can be derived. We found a significant decrease in chromatic sensitivity due to ageing, in particular along the tritan line. From the unique hue settings we derived the cone weightings associated with the colour mechanisms that are at equilibrium for the four unique hues. We found that the relative cone weightings (w(L) /w(M) and w(L) /w(S)) associated with the unique hues were independent of age. Our results are consistent with previous findings that the unique hues are rather constant with age while chromatic sensitivity declines. They also provide evidence in favour of the hypothesis that higher-order colour mechanisms are equipped with flexible cone weightings, as opposed to fixed weights. The mechanism underlying this compensation is still poorly understood.

Abstract: Transcription of handwritten text in (old) documents is an important, time-consuming task for digital libraries. It might be carried out by first processing all document images off-line, and then manually supervising system transcriptions to edit incorrect parts. However, current techniques for automatic page layout analysis, text line detection and handwriting recognition are still far from perfect, and thus post-editing system output is not clearly better than simply ignoring it.
A more effective approach to transcribe old text documents is to follow an interactive- predictive paradigm in which both, the system is guided by the user, and the user is assisted by the system to complete the transcription task as efficiently as possible. Following this approach, a system prototype called GIDOC (Gimp-based Interactive transcription of old text DOCuments) has been developed to provide user-friendly, integrated support for interactive-predictive layout analysis, line detection and handwriting transcription.
GIDOC is designed to work with (large) collections of homogeneous documents, that is, of similar structure and writing styles. They are annotated sequentially, by (par- tially) supervising hypotheses drawn from statistical models that are constantly updated with an increasing number of available annotated documents. And this is done at different annotation levels. For instance, at the level of page layout analysis, GIDOC uses a novel text block detection method in which conventional, memoryless techniques are improved with a “history” model of text block positions. Similarly, at the level of text line image transcription, GIDOC includes a handwriting recognizer which is steadily improved with a growing number of (partially) supervised transcriptions.

Abstract: A new handwritten text database, GERMANA, is presented to facilitate empirical comparison of different approaches to text line extraction and off-line handwriting recognition. GERMANA is the result of digitising and annotating a 764-page Spanish manuscript from 1891, in which most pages only contain nearly calligraphed text written on ruled sheets of well-separated lines. To our knowledge, it is the first publicly available database for handwriting research, mostly written in Spanish and comparable in size to standard databases. Due to its sequential book structure, it is also well-suited for realistic assessment of interactive handwriting recognition systems. To provide baseline results for reference in future studies, empirical results are also reported, using standard techniques and tools for preprocessing, feature extraction, HMM-based image modelling, and language modelling.