Abstract: In this paper we dene a bidimensional extension of Stochastic Context-Free Grammars for structure detection and segmentation of images of documents.
Two sets of text classication features are used to perform an initial classication of each zone of the page. Then, the document segmentation is obtained as the most likely hypothesis according to a stochastic grammar. We used a dataset of historical marriage license books to validate this approach. We also tested several inference algorithms for Probabilistic Graphical Models
and the results showed that the proposed grammatical model outperformed
the other methods. Furthermore, grammars also provide the document structure
along with its segmentation.

Abstract: Despite being very successful within the pattern recognition and machine learning community, graph-based methods are often unusable because of the lack of mathematical operations defined in graph domain. Graph embedding, which maps graphs to a vectorial space, has been proposed as a way to tackle these difficulties enabling the use of standard machine learning techniques. However, it is well known that graph embedding functions usually suffer from the loss of structural information. In this paper, we consider the hierarchical structure of a graph as a way to mitigate this loss of information. The hierarchical structure is constructed by topologically clustering the graph nodes and considering each cluster as a node in the upper hierarchical level. Once this hierarchical structure is constructed, we consider several configurations to define the mapping into a vector space given a classical graph embedding, in particular, we propose to make use of the stochastic graphlet embedding (SGE). Broadly speaking, SGE produces a distribution of uniformly sampled low-to-high-order graphlets as a way to embed graphs into the vector space. In what follows, the coarse-to-fine structure of a graph hierarchy and the statistics fetched by the SGE complements each other and includes important structural information with varied contexts. Altogether, these two techniques substantially cope with the usual information loss involved in graph embedding techniques, obtaining a more robust graph representation. This fact has been corroborated through a detailed experimental evaluation on various benchmark graph datasets, where we outperform the state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract: In this paper, we address two complex issues: 1) Text frame classification and 2) Multi-oriented text detection in video text frame. We first divide a video frame into 16 blocks and propose a combination of wavelet and median-moments with k-means clustering at the block level to identify probable text blocks. For each probable text block, the method applies the same combination of feature with k-means clustering over a sliding window running through the blocks to identify potential text candidates. We introduce a new idea of symmetry on text candidates in each block based on the observation that pixel distribution in text exhibits a symmetric pattern. The method integrates all blocks containing text candidates in the frame and then all text candidates are mapped on to a Sobel edge map of the original frame to obtain text representatives. To tackle the multi-orientation problem, we present a new method called Angle Projection Boundary Growing (APBG) which is an iterative algorithm and works based on a nearest neighbor concept. APBG is then applied on the text representatives to fix the bounding box for multi-oriented text lines in the video frame. Directional information is used to eliminate false positives. Experimental results on a variety of datasets such as non-horizontal, horizontal, publicly available data (Hua’s data) and ICDAR-03 competition data (camera images) show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods proposed for video and the state of the art methods for scene text as well.

Abstract: Aesthetic image analysis is essential for improving the performance of multimedia image retrieval systems, especially from a repository of social media and multimedia content stored on mobile devices. This paper presents a novel method for classifying aesthetic natural scene images by studying the naturalness of image content using statistical features, and reading text in the images using semantic features. Unlike existing methods that focus only on image quality with human information, the proposed approach focuses on image features as well as text-based semantic features without human intervention to reduce the gap between subjectivity and objectivity in the classification. The aesthetic classes considered in this work are (i) Very Pleasant, (ii) Pleasant, (iii) Normal and (iv) Unpleasant. The naturalness is represented by features of focus, defocus, perceived brightness, perceived contrast, blurriness and noisiness, while semantics are represented by text recognition, description of the images and labels of images, profile pictures, and banner images. Furthermore, a deep learning model is proposed in a novel way to fuse statistical and semantic features for the classification of aesthetic natural scene images. Experiments on our own dataset and the standard datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves 92.74%, 88.67% and 83.22% average classification rates on our own dataset, AVA dataset and CUHKPQ dataset, respectively. Furthermore, a comparative study of the proposed model with the existing methods shows that the proposed method is effective for the classification of aesthetic social media images.

Abstract: With the ongoing progress in digitization, huge document collections and archives have become available to a broad audience. Scanned document images can be transmitted electronically and studied simultaneously throughout the world. While this is very beneficial, it is often impossible to perform automated searches on these document collections. Optical character recognition usually fails when it comes to handwritten or historic documents. In order to address the need for exploring document collections rapidly, researchers are working on word spotting. In query-by-example word spotting scenarios, the user selects an exemplary occurrence of the query word in a document image. The word spotting system then retrieves all regions in the collection that are visually similar to the given example of the query word. The best matching regions are presented to the user and no actual transcription is required.
An important property of a word spotting system is the computational speed with which queries can be executed. In our previous work, we presented a relatively slow but high-precision method. In the present work, we will extend this baseline system to an integrated two-stage approach. In a coarse-grained first stage, we will filter document images efficiently in order to identify regions that are likely to contain the query word. In the fine-grained second stage, these regions will be analyzed with our previously presented high-precision method. Finally, we will report recognition results and query times for the well-known George Washington
benchmark in our evaluation. We achieve state-of-the-art recognition results while the query times can be reduced to 50% in comparison with our baseline.