Abstract: This paper presents a novel application to detect counterfeit identity documents forged by a scan-printing operation. Texture analysis approaches are proposed to extract validation features from security background that is usually printed in documents as IDs or banknotes. The main contribution of this work is the end-to-end mobile-server architecture, which provides a service for non-expert users and therefore can be used in several scenarios. The system also provides a crowdsourcing mode so labeled images can be gathered, generating databases for incremental training of the algorithms.

Abstract: Historical ciphered manuscripts are a type of document where graphical symbols are used to encrypt their content instead of regular text. Nowadays, expert transcriptions can be found in libraries alongside the corresponding manuscript images. However, those transcriptions are not aligned, so these are barely usable for training deep learning-based recognition methods. To solve this issue, we propose a method to align each symbol in the transcript of an image with its visual representation by using an attention-based Sequence to Sequence (Seq2Seq) model. The core idea is that, by learning to recognise symbols sequence within a cipher line image, the model also identifies their position implicitly through an attention mechanism. Thus, the resulting symbol segmentation can be later used for training algorithms. The experimental evaluation shows that this method is promising, especially taking into account the small size of the cipher dataset.

Abstract: Best Poster Award.
Reducing the amount of keypoints used to index an image is particularly interesting to control processing time and memory usage in real-time document image matching applications, like augmented documents or smartphone applications. This paper benchmarks two keypoint selection methods on a task consisting of reducing keypoint sets extracted from document images, while preserving detection and segmentation accuracy. We first study the different forms of keypoint filtering, and we introduce the use of the CORE selection method on
keypoints extracted from document images. Then, we extend a previously published benchmark by including evaluations of the new method, by adding the SURF-BRISK detection/description scheme, and by reporting processing speeds. Evaluations are conducted on the publicly available dataset of ICDAR2015 SmartDOC challenge 1. Finally, we prove that reducing the original keypoint set is always feasible and can be beneficial
not only to processing speed but also to accuracy.

Abstract: Text detection and recognition in a natural environment are key components of many applications, ranging from business card digitization to shop indexation in a street. This competition aims at assessing the ability of state-of-the-art methods to detect Multi-Lingual Text (MLT) in scene images, such as in contents gathered from the Internet media and in modern cities where multiple cultures live and communicate together. This competition is an extension of the Robust Reading Competition (RRC) which has been held since 2003 both in ICDAR and in an online context. The proposed competition is presented as a new challenge of the RRC. The dataset built for this challenge largely extends the previous RRC editions in many aspects: the multi-lingual text, the size of the dataset, the multi-oriented text, the wide variety of scenes. The dataset is comprised of 18,000 images which contain text belonging to 9 languages. The challenge is comprised of three tasks related to text detection and script classification. We have received a total of 16 participations from the research and industrial communities. This paper presents the dataset, the tasks and the findings of this RRC-MLT challenge.

Abstract: Information Retrieval (IR) is the activity of obtaining information resources relevant to a questioned information. It usually retrieves a set of objects ranked according to the relevancy to the needed fact. In document analysis, information retrieval receives a lot of attention in terms of symbol and word spotting. However, through decades the community mostly focused either on printed or on single writer scenario, where the
state-of-the-art results have achieved reasonable performance on the available datasets. Nevertheless, the existing algorithms do not perform accordingly on multiwriter scenario. A graph representing relations between a set of objects is a structure where each node delineates an individual element and the similarity between them is represented as a weight on the connecting edge. In this paper, we explore different analytics of graphs constructed from words or graphical symbols, such as diffusion, shortest path, etc. to improve the performance of information retrieval methods in multiwriter scenario