Abstract: To cope with the tremendous variations of writing styles encountered between different individuals, unconstrained automatic handwriting recognition systems need to be trained on large sets of labeled data. Traditionally, the training data has to be labeled manually, which is a laborious and costly process. Semi-supervised learning techniques offer methods to utilize unlabeled data, which can be obtained cheaply in large amounts in order, to reduce the need for labeled data. In this paper, we propose the use of Co-Training for improving the recognition accuracy of two weakly trained handwriting recognition systems. The first one is based on Recurrent Neural Networks while the second one is based on Hidden Markov Models. On the IAM off-line handwriting database we demonstrate a significant increase of the recognition accuracy can be achieved with Co-Training for single word recognition.

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: This paper is focused on the categorization of administrative document images (such as invoices) based on the recognition of the supplier's graphical logo. Two different methods are proposed, the first one uses a bag-of-visual-words model whereas the second one tries to locate logo images described by the blurred shape model descriptor within documents by a sliding-window technique. Preliminar results are reported with a dataset of real administrative documents.

Abstract: Se analizan los sistemas de procesamiento automático que trabajan sobre documentos digitalizados con el objetivo de describir los contenidos. De esta forma contribuyen a facilitar el acceso, permitir la indización automática y hacer accesibles los documentos a los motores de búsqueda. El objetivo de estas tecnologías es poder entrenar modelos computacionales que sean capaces de clasificar, agrupar o realizar búsquedas sobre documentos digitales. Así, se describen las tareas de clasificación, agrupamiento y búsqueda. Cuando utilizamos tecnologías de inteligencia artificial en los sistemas de
clasificación esperamos que la herramienta nos devuelva etiquetas semánticas; en sistemas de agrupamiento que nos devuelva documentos agrupados en clusters significativos; y en sistemas de búsqueda esperamos que dada una consulta, nos devuelva una lista ordenada de documentos en función de la relevancia. A continuación se da una visión de conjunto de los métodos que nos permiten describir los documentos digitales, tanto de manera visual (cuál es su apariencia), como a partir de sus contenidos semánticos (de qué hablan). En cuanto a la descripción visual de documentos se aborda el estado de la cuestión de las representaciones numéricas de documentos digitalizados
tanto por métodos clásicos como por métodos basados en el aprendizaje profundo (deep learning). Respecto de la descripción semántica de los contenidos se analizan técnicas como el reconocimiento óptico de caracteres (OCR); el cálculo de estadísticas básicas sobre la aparición de las diferentes palabras en un texto (bag-of-words model); y los métodos basados en aprendizaje profundo como el método word2vec, basado en una red neuronal que, dadas unas cuantas palabras de un texto, debe predecir cuál será la
siguiente palabra. Desde el campo de las ingenierías se están transfiriendo conocimientos que se han integrado en productos o servicios en los ámbitos de la archivística, la biblioteconomía, la documentación y las plataformas de gran consumo, sin embargo los algoritmos deben ser lo suficientemente eficientes no sólo para el reconocimiento y transcripción literal sino también para la capacidad de interpretación de los contenidos.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a circular blurred shape model descriptor to deal with the problem of symbol detection and classification as a particular case of object recognition. The feature extraction is performed by capturing the spatial arrangement of significant object characteristics in a correlogram structure. The shape information from objects is shared among correlogram regions, where a prior blurring degree defines the level of distortion allowed in the symbol, making the descriptor tolerant to irregular deformations. Moreover, the descriptor is rotation invariant by definition. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed descriptor in both the multiclass symbol recognition and symbol detection domains. In order to perform the symbol detection, the descriptors are learned using a cascade of classifiers. In the case of multiclass categorization, the new feature space is learned using a set of binary classifiers which are embedded in an error-correcting output code design. The results over four symbol data sets show the significant improvements of the proposed descriptor compared to the state-of-the-art descriptors. In particular, the results are even more significant in those cases where the symbols suffer from elastic deformations.