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Yipeng Sun and 11 others. 2019. ICDAR 2019 Competition on Large-Scale Street View Text with Partial Labeling – RRC-LSVT. 15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.1557–1562.
Abstract: Robust text reading from street view images provides valuable information for various applications. Performance improvement of existing methods in such a challenging scenario heavily relies on the amount of fully annotated training data, which is costly and in-efficient to obtain. To scale up the amount of training data while keeping the labeling procedure cost-effective, this competition introduces a new challenge on Large-scale Street View Text with Partial Labeling (LSVT), providing 50, 000 and 400, 000 images in full and weak annotations, respectively. This competition aims to explore the abilities of state-of-the-art methods to detect and recognize text instances from large-scale street view images, closing the gap between research benchmarks and real applications. During the competition period, a total of 41 teams participated in the two proposed tasks with 132 valid submissions, ie, text detection and end-to-end text spotting. This paper includes dataset descriptions, task definitions, evaluation protocols and results summaries of the ICDAR 2019-LSVT challenge.
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Chee-Kheng Chng and 13 others. 2019. ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Arbitrary-Shaped Text – RRC-ArT. 15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.1571–1576.
Abstract: This paper reports the ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Arbitrary-Shaped Text – RRC-ArT that consists of three major challenges: i) scene text detection, ii) scene text recognition, and iii) scene text spotting. A total of 78 submissions from 46 unique teams/individuals were received for this competition. The top performing score of each challenge is as follows: i) T1 – 82.65%, ii) T2.1 – 74.3%, iii) T2.2 – 85.32%, iv) T3.1 – 53.86%, and v) T3.2 – 54.91%. Apart from the results, this paper also details the ArT dataset, tasks description, evaluation metrics and participants' methods. The dataset, the evaluation kit as well as the results are publicly available at the challenge website.
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Nibal Nayef and 10 others. 2019. ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Multi-lingual Scene Text Detection and Recognition — RRC-MLT-2019. 15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.1582–1587.
Abstract: With the growing cosmopolitan culture of modern cities, the need of robust Multi-Lingual scene Text (MLT) detection and recognition systems has never been more immense. With the goal to systematically benchmark and push the state-of-the-art forward, the proposed competition builds on top of the RRC-MLT-2017 with an additional end-to-end task, an additional language in the real images dataset, a large scale multi-lingual synthetic dataset to assist the training, and a baseline End-to-End recognition method. The real dataset consists of 20,000 images containing text from 10 languages. The challenge has 4 tasks covering various aspects of multi-lingual scene text: (a) text detection, (b) cropped word script classification, (c) joint text detection and script classification and (d) end-to-end detection and recognition. In total, the competition received 60 submissions from the research and industrial communities. This paper presents the dataset, the tasks and the findings of the presented RRC-MLT-2019 challenge.
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Dena Bazazian, Raul Gomez, Anguelos Nicolaou, Lluis Gomez, Dimosthenis Karatzas and Andrew Bagdanov. 2019. Fast: Facilitated and accurate scene text proposals through fcn guided pruning. PRL, 119, 112–120.
Abstract: Class-specific text proposal algorithms can efficiently reduce the search space for possible text object locations in an image. In this paper we combine the Text Proposals algorithm with Fully Convolutional Networks to efficiently reduce the number of proposals while maintaining the same recall level and thus gaining a significant speed up. Our experiments demonstrate that such text proposal approaches yield significantly higher recall rates than state-of-the-art text localization techniques, while also producing better-quality localizations. Our results on the ICDAR 2015 Robust Reading Competition (Challenge 4) and the COCO-text datasets show that, when combined with strong word classifiers, this recall margin leads to state-of-the-art results in end-to-end scene text recognition.
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Lei Kang, Pau Riba, Mauricio Villegas, Alicia Fornes and Marçal Rusiñol. 2021. Candidate Fusion: Integrating Language Modelling into a Sequence-to-Sequence Handwritten Word Recognition Architecture. PR, 112, 107790.
Abstract: Sequence-to-sequence models have recently become very popular for tackling
handwritten word recognition problems. However, how to effectively integrate an external language model into such recognizer is still a challenging
problem. The main challenge faced when training a language model is to
deal with the language model corpus which is usually different to the one
used for training the handwritten word recognition system. Thus, the bias
between both word corpora leads to incorrectness on the transcriptions, providing similar or even worse performances on the recognition task. In this
work, we introduce Candidate Fusion, a novel way to integrate an external
language model to a sequence-to-sequence architecture. Moreover, it provides suggestions from an external language knowledge, as a new input to
the sequence-to-sequence recognizer. Hence, Candidate Fusion provides two
improvements. On the one hand, the sequence-to-sequence recognizer has
the flexibility not only to combine the information from itself and the language model, but also to choose the importance of the information provided
by the language model. On the other hand, the external language model
has the ability to adapt itself to the training corpus and even learn the
most commonly errors produced from the recognizer. Finally, by conducting
comprehensive experiments, the Candidate Fusion proves to outperform the
state-of-the-art language models for handwritten word recognition tasks.
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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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Beata Megyesi and 9 others. 2020. Decryption of historical manuscripts: the DECRYPT project. CRYPT, 44(6), 545–559.
Abstract: Many historians and linguists are working individually and in an uncoordinated fashion on the identification and decryption of historical ciphers. This is a time-consuming process as they often work without access to automatic methods and processes that can accelerate the decipherment. At the same time, computer scientists and cryptologists are developing algorithms to decrypt various cipher types without having access to a large number of original ciphertexts. In this paper, we describe the DECRYPT project aiming at the creation of resources and tools for historical cryptology by bringing the expertise of various disciplines together for collecting data, exchanging methods for faster progress to transcribe, decrypt and contextualize historical encrypted manuscripts. We present our goals and work-in progress of a general approach for analyzing historical encrypted manuscripts using standardized methods and a new set of state-of-the-art tools. We release the data and tools as open-source hoping that all mentioned disciplines would benefit and contribute to the research infrastructure of historical cryptology.
Keywords: automatic decryption; cipher collection; historical cryptology; image transcription
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Anjan Dutta, Pau Riba, Josep Llados and Alicia Fornes. 2020. Hierarchical Stochastic Graphlet Embedding for Graph-based Pattern Recognition. NEUCOMA, 32, 11579–11596.
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.
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Pau Riba, Josep Llados and Alicia Fornes. 2020. Hierarchical graphs for coarse-to-fine error tolerant matching. PRL, 134, 116–124.
Abstract: During the last years, graph-based representations are experiencing a growing usage in visual recognition and retrieval due to their ability to capture both structural and appearance-based information. Thus, they provide a greater representational power than classical statistical frameworks. However, graph-based representations leads to high computational complexities usually dealt by graph embeddings or approximated matching techniques. Despite their representational power, they are very sensitive to noise and small variations of the input image. With the aim to cope with the time complexity and the variability present in the generated graphs, in this paper we propose to construct a novel hierarchical graph representation. Graph clustering techniques adapted from social media analysis have been used in order to contract a graph at different abstraction levels while keeping information about the topology. Abstract nodes attributes summarise information about the contracted graph partition. For the proposed representations, a coarse-to-fine matching technique is defined. Hence, small graphs are used as a filtering before more accurate matching methods are applied. This approach has been validated in real scenarios such as classification of colour images or retrieval of handwritten words (i.e. word spotting).
Keywords: Hierarchical graph representation; Coarse-to-fine graph matching; Graph-based retrieval
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Alicia Fornes, Josep Llados and Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora. 2020. Browsing of the Social Network of the Past: Information Extraction from Population Manuscript Images. Handwritten Historical Document Analysis, Recognition, and Retrieval – State of the Art and Future Trends. World Scientific.
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