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Christophe Rigaud, Clement Guerin, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Jean-Christophe Burie and Jean-Marc Ogier. 2015. Knowledge-driven understanding of images in comic books. IJDAR, 18(3), 199–221.
Abstract: Document analysis is an active field of research, which can attain a complete understanding of the semantics of a given document. One example of the document understanding process is enabling a computer to identify the key elements of a comic book story and arrange them according to a predefined domain knowledge. In this study, we propose a knowledge-driven system that can interact with bottom-up and top-down information to progressively understand the content of a document. We model the comic book’s and the image processing domains knowledge for information consistency analysis. In addition, different image processing methods are improved or developed to extract panels, balloons, tails, texts, comic characters and their semantic relations in an unsupervised way.
Keywords: Document Understanding; comics analysis; expert system
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David Aldavert, Marçal Rusiñol, Ricardo Toledo and Josep Llados. 2015. A Study of Bag-of-Visual-Words Representations for Handwritten Keyword Spotting. IJDAR, 18(3), 223–234.
Abstract: The Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) framework has gained popularity among the document image analysis community, specifically as a representation of handwritten words for recognition or spotting purposes. Although in the computer vision field the BoVW method has been greatly improved, most of the approaches in the document image analysis domain still rely on the basic implementation of the BoVW method disregarding such latest refinements. In this paper, we present a review of those improvements and its application to the keyword spotting task. We thoroughly evaluate their impact against a baseline system in the well-known George Washington dataset and compare the obtained results against nine state-of-the-art keyword spotting methods. In addition, we also compare both the baseline and improved systems with the methods presented at the Handwritten Keyword Spotting Competition 2014.
Keywords: Bag-of-Visual-Words; Keyword spotting; Handwritten documents; Performance evaluation
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Lluis Gomez and Dimosthenis Karatzas. 2016. A fast hierarchical method for multi‐script and arbitrary oriented scene text extraction. IJDAR, 19(4), 335–349.
Abstract: Typography and layout lead to the hierarchical organisation of text in words, text lines, paragraphs. This inherent structure is a key property of text in any script and language, which has nonetheless been minimally leveraged by existing text detection methods. This paper addresses the problem of text
segmentation in natural scenes from a hierarchical perspective.
Contrary to existing methods, we make explicit use of text structure, aiming directly to the detection of region groupings corresponding to text within a hierarchy produced by an agglomerative similarity clustering process over individual regions. We propose an optimal way to construct such an hierarchy introducing a feature space designed to produce text group hypotheses with
high recall and a novel stopping rule combining a discriminative classifier and a probabilistic measure of group meaningfulness based in perceptual organization. Results obtained over four standard datasets, covering text in variable orientations and different languages, demonstrate that our algorithm, while being trained in a single mixed dataset, outperforms state of the art
methods in unconstrained scenarios.
Keywords: scene text; segmentation; detection; hierarchical grouping; perceptual organisation
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Sounak Dey, Anguelos Nicolaou, Josep Llados and Umapada Pal. 2019. Evaluation of the Effect of Improper Segmentation on Word Spotting. IJDAR, 22, 361–374.
Abstract: Word spotting is an important recognition task in large-scale retrieval of document collections. In most of the cases, methods are developed and evaluated assuming perfect word segmentation. In this paper, we propose an experimental framework to quantify the goodness that word segmentation has on the performance achieved by word spotting methods in identical unbiased conditions. The framework consists of generating systematic distortions on segmentation and retrieving the original queries from the distorted dataset. We have tested our framework on several established and state-of-the-art methods using George Washington and Barcelona Marriage Datasets. The experiments done allow for an estimate of the end-to-end performance of word spotting methods.
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Sanket Biswas, Pau Riba, Josep Llados and Umapada Pal. 2021. Beyond Document Object Detection: Instance-Level Segmentation of Complex Layouts. IJDAR, 24, 269–281.
Abstract: Information extraction is a fundamental task of many business intelligence services that entail massive document processing. Understanding a document page structure in terms of its layout provides contextual support which is helpful in the semantic interpretation of the document terms. In this paper, inspired by the progress of deep learning methodologies applied to the task of object recognition, we transfer these models to the specific case of document object detection, reformulating the traditional problem of document layout analysis. Moreover, we importantly contribute to prior arts by defining the task of instance segmentation on the document image domain. An instance segmentation paradigm is especially important in complex layouts whose contents should interact for the proper rendering of the page, i.e., the proper text wrapping around an image. Finally, we provide an extensive evaluation, both qualitative and quantitative, that demonstrates the superior performance of the proposed methodology over the current state of the art.
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Minesh Mathew, Lluis Gomez, Dimosthenis Karatzas and C.V. Jawahar. 2021. Asking questions on handwritten document collections. IJDAR, 24, 235–249.
Abstract: This work addresses the problem of Question Answering (QA) on handwritten document collections. Unlike typical QA and Visual Question Answering (VQA) formulations where the answer is a short text, we aim to locate a document snippet where the answer lies. The proposed approach works without recognizing the text in the documents. We argue that the recognition-free approach is suitable for handwritten documents and historical collections where robust text recognition is often difficult. At the same time, for human users, document image snippets containing answers act as a valid alternative to textual answers. The proposed approach uses an off-the-shelf deep embedding network which can project both textual words and word images into a common sub-space. This embedding bridges the textual and visual domains and helps us retrieve document snippets that potentially answer a question. We evaluate results of the proposed approach on two new datasets: (i) HW-SQuAD: a synthetic, handwritten document image counterpart of SQuAD1.0 dataset and (ii) BenthamQA: a smaller set of QA pairs defined on documents from the popular Bentham manuscripts collection. We also present a thorough analysis of the proposed recognition-free approach compared to a recognition-based approach which uses text recognized from the images using an OCR. Datasets presented in this work are available to download at docvqa.org.
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Ayan Banerjee, Sanket Biswas, Josep Llados and Umapada Pal. 2024. SemiDocSeg: Harnessing Semi-Supervised Learning for Document Layout Analysis. IJDAR.
Abstract: Document Layout Analysis (DLA) is the process of automatically identifying and categorizing the structural components (e.g. Text, Figure, Table, etc.) within a document to extract meaningful content and establish the page's layout structure. It is a crucial stage in document parsing, contributing to their comprehension. However, traditional DLA approaches often demand a significant volume of labeled training data, and the labor-intensive task of generating high-quality annotated training data poses a substantial challenge. In order to address this challenge, we proposed a semi-supervised setting that aims to perform learning on limited annotated categories by eliminating exhaustive and expensive mask annotations. The proposed setting is expected to be generalizable to novel categories as it learns the underlying positional information through a support set and class information through Co-Occurrence that can be generalized from annotated categories to novel categories. Here, we first extract features from the input image and support set with a shared multi-scale feature acquisition backbone. Then, the extracted feature representation is fed to the transformer encoder as a query. Later on, we utilize a semantic embedding network before the decoder to capture the underlying semantic relationships and similarities between different instances, enabling the model to make accurate predictions or classifications with only a limited amount of labeled data. Extensive experimentation on competitive benchmarks like PRIMA, DocLayNet, and Historical Japanese (HJ) demonstrate that this generalized setup obtains significant performance compared to the conventional supervised approach.
Keywords: Document layout analysis; Semi-supervised learning; Co-Occurrence matrix; Instance segmentation; Swin transformer
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Ernest Valveny and 11 others. 2006. A general framework for the evaluation of symbol recognition methods.
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Ernest Valveny and Philippe Dosch. 2007. A General Framework for the Evaluation of Symbol Recognition Methods.
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Pau Torras, Arnau Baro, Lei Kang and Alicia Fornes. 2021. On the Integration of Language Models into Sequence to Sequence Architectures for Handwritten Music Recognition. International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference.690–696.
Abstract: Despite the latest advances in Deep Learning, the recognition of handwritten music scores is still a challenging endeavour. Even though the recent Sequence to Sequence(Seq2Seq) architectures have demonstrated its capacity to reliably recognise handwritten text, their performance is still far from satisfactory when applied to historical handwritten scores. Indeed, the ambiguous nature of handwriting, the non-standard musical notation employed by composers of the time and the decaying state of old paper make these scores remarkably difficult to read, sometimes even by trained humans. Thus, in this work we explore the incorporation of language models into a Seq2Seq-based architecture to try to improve transcriptions where the aforementioned unclear writing produces statistically unsound mistakes, which as far as we know, has never been attempted for this field of research on this architecture. After studying various Language Model integration techniques, the experimental evaluation on historical handwritten music scores shows a significant improvement over the state of the art, showing that this is a promising research direction for dealing with such difficult manuscripts.
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