Abstract: This note introduces a visual attention model of text localization in real-world scenes. The core of the model built upon the proto-object concept is discussed. It is shown how such dynamic mid-level representation of the scene can be derived in the framework of an action-perception loop engaging salience, text information value computation, and eye guidance mechanisms.
Preliminary results that compare model generated scanpaths with those eye-tracked from human subjects are presented.

Abstract: In this paper we present a retrieval-based application aimed at assisting a user to semi-automatically segment an incoming flow of historical newspaper images by automatically detecting a particular type of pages based on their appearance. A visual descriptor is used to assess page similarity while a relevance feedback process allow refining the results iteratively. The application is tested on a large dataset of digitised historic newspapers.

Abstract: In this paper we propose an approach for word spotting in handwritten document images. We state the problem from a focused retrieval perspective, i.e. locating instances of a query word in a large scale dataset of digitized manuscripts. We combine two approaches, namely one based on word segmentation and another one segmentation-free. The first approach uses a hashing strategy to coarsely prune word images that are unlikely to be instances of the query word. This process is fast but has a low precision due to the errors introduced in the segmentation step. The regions containing candidate words are sent to the second process based on a state of the art technique from the visual object detection field. This discriminative model represents the appearance of the query word and computes a similarity score. In this way we propose a coarse-to-fine approach achieving a compromise between efficiency and accuracy. The validation of the model is shown using a collection of old handwritten manuscripts. We appreciate a substantial improvement in terms of precision regarding the previous proposed method with a low computational cost increase.

Abstract: In this article, we focus on the problem of large-scale instance-level image retrieval. For efficiency reasons, it is common to represent an image by a fixed-length descriptor which is subsequently encoded into a small number of bits. We note that most encoding techniques include an unsupervised dimensionality reduction step. Our goal in this work is to learn a better subspace in a supervised manner. We especially raise the following question: “can category-level labels be used to learn such a subspace?” To answer this question, we experiment with four learning techniques: the first one is based on a metric learning framework, the second one on attribute representations, the third one on Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) and the fourth one on Joint Subspace and Classifier Learning (JSCL). While the first three approaches have been applied in the past to the image retrieval problem, we believe we are the first to show the usefulness of JSCL in this context. In our experiments, we use ImageNet as a source of category-level labels and report retrieval results on two standard dataseis: INRIA Holidays and the University of Kentucky benchmark. Our experimental study shows that metric learning and attributes do not lead to any significant improvement in retrieval accuracy, as opposed to CCA and JSCL. As an example, we report on Holidays an increase in accuracy from 39.3% to 48.6% with 32-dimensional representations. Overall JSCL is shown to yield the best results.