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G.Thorvaldsen and 6 others. 2015. A Tale of two Transcriptions.
Abstract: non-indexed
This article explains how two projects implement semi-automated transcription routines: for census sheets in Norway and marriage protocols from Barcelona. The Spanish system was created to transcribe the marriage license books from 1451 to 1905 for the Barcelona area; one of the world’s longest series of preserved vital records. Thus, in the Project “Five Centuries of Marriages” (5CofM) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s Center for Demographic Studies, the Barcelona Historical Marriage Database has been built. More than 600,000 records were transcribed by 150 transcribers working online. The Norwegian material is cross-sectional as it is the 1891 census, recorded on one sheet per person. This format and the underlining of keywords for several variables made it more feasible to semi-automate data entry than when many persons are listed on the same page. While Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for printed text is scientifically mature, computer vision research is now focused on more difficult problems such as handwriting recognition. In the marriage project, document analysis methods have been proposed to automatically recognize the marriage licenses. Fully automatic recognition is still a challenge, but some promising results have been obtained. In Spain, Norway and elsewhere the source material is available as scanned pictures on the Internet, opening up the possibility for further international cooperation concerning automating the transcription of historic source materials. Like what is being done in projects to digitize printed materials, the optimal solution is likely to be a combination of manual transcription and machine-assisted recognition also for hand-written sources.
Keywords: Nominative Sources; Census; Vital Records; Computer Vision; Optical Character Recognition; Word Spotting
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Thanh Ha Do, Salvatore Tabbone and Oriol Ramos Terrades. 2012. Text/graphic separation using a sparse representation with multi-learned dictionaries. 21st International Conference on Pattern Recognition.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new approach to extract text regions from graphical documents. In our method, we first empirically construct two sequences of learned dictionaries for the text and graphical parts respectively. Then, we compute the sparse representations of all different sizes and non-overlapped document patches in these learned dictionaries. Based on these representations, each patch can be classified into the text or graphic category by comparing its reconstruction errors. Same-sized patches in one category are then merged together to define the corresponding text or graphic layers which are combined to createfinal text/graphic layer. Finally, in a post-processing step, text regions are further filtered out by using some learned thresholds.
Keywords: Graphics Recognition; Layout Analysis; Document Understandin
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Jon Almazan, Albert Gordo, Alicia Fornes and Ernest Valveny. 2012. Efficient Exemplar Word Spotting. 23rd British Machine Vision Conference.67.1–67.11.
Abstract: In this paper we propose an unsupervised segmentation-free method for word spotting in document images.
Documents are represented with a grid of HOG descriptors, and a sliding window approach is used to locate the document regions that are most similar to the query. We use the exemplar SVM framework to produce a better representation of the query in an unsupervised way. Finally, the document descriptors are precomputed and compressed with Product Quantization. This offers two advantages: first, a large number of documents can be kept in RAM memory at the same time. Second, the sliding window becomes significantly faster since distances between quantized HOG descriptors can be precomputed. Our results significantly outperform other segmentation-free methods in the literature, both in accuracy and in speed and memory usage.
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Sophie Wuerger, Kaida Xiao, Dimitris Mylonas, Q. Huang, Dimosthenis Karatzas and Galina Paramei. 2012. Blue green color categorization in mandarin english speakers. JOSA A, 29(2), A102–A1207.
Abstract: Observers are faster to detect a target among a set of distracters if the targets and distracters come from different color categories. This cross-boundary advantage seems to be limited to the right visual field, which is consistent with the dominance of the left hemisphere for language processing [Gilbert et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103, 489 (2006)]. Here we study whether a similar visual field advantage is found in the color identification task in speakers of Mandarin, a language that uses a logographic system. Forty late Mandarin-English bilinguals performed a blue-green color categorization task, in a blocked design, in their first language (L1: Mandarin) or second language (L2: English). Eleven color singletons ranging from blue to green were presented for 160 ms, randomly in the left visual field (LVF) or right visual field (RVF). Color boundary and reaction times (RTs) at the color boundary were estimated in L1 and L2, for both visual fields. We found that the color boundary did not differ between the languages; RTs at the color boundary, however, were on average more than 100 ms shorter in the English compared to the Mandarin sessions, but only when the stimuli were presented in the RVF. The finding may be explained by the script nature of the two languages: Mandarin logographic characters are analyzed visuospatially in the right hemisphere, which conceivably facilitates identification of color presented to the LVF.
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Josep Llados, Horst Bunke and Enric Marti. 1997. Finding rotational symmetries by cyclic string matching. PRL, 18(14), 1435–1442.
Abstract: Symmetry is an important shape feature. In this paper, a simple and fast method to detect perfect and distorted rotational symmetries of 2D objects is described. The boundary of a shape is polygonally approximated and represented as a string. Rotational symmetries are found by cyclic string matching between two identical copies of the shape string. The set of minimum cost edit sequences that transform the shape string to a cyclically shifted version of itself define the rotational symmetry and its order. Finally, a modification of the algorithm is proposed to detect reflectional symmetries. Some experimental results are presented to show the reliability of the proposed algorithm
Keywords: Rotational symmetry; Reflectional symmetry; String matching
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Jose Antonio Rodriguez, Florent Perronnin, Gemma Sanchez and Josep Llados. 2010. Unsupervised writer adaptation of whole-word HMMs with application to word-spotting. PRL, 31(8), 742–749.
Abstract: In this paper we propose a novel approach for writer adaptation in a handwritten word-spotting task. The method exploits the fact that the semi-continuous hidden Markov model separates the word model parameters into (i) a codebook of shapes and (ii) a set of word-specific parameters.
Our main contribution is to employ this property to derive writer-specific word models by statistically adapting an initial universal codebook to each document. This process is unsupervised and does not even require the appearance of the keyword(s) in the searched document. Experimental results show an increase in performance when this adaptation technique is applied. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work dealing with adaptation for word-spotting. The preliminary version of this paper obtained an IBM Best Student Paper Award at the 19th International Conference on Pattern Recognition.
Keywords: Word-spotting; Handwriting recognition; Writer adaptation; Hidden Markov model; Document analysis
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Albert Gordo, Florent Perronnin and Ernest Valveny. 2013. Large-scale document image retrieval and classification with runlength histograms and binary embeddings. PR, 46(7), 1898–1905.
Abstract: We present a new document image descriptor based on multi-scale runlength
histograms. This descriptor does not rely on layout analysis and can be
computed efficiently. We show how this descriptor can achieve state-of-theart
results on two very different public datasets in classification and retrieval
tasks. Moreover, we show how we can compress and binarize these descriptors
to make them suitable for large-scale applications. We can achieve state-ofthe-
art results in classification using binary descriptors of as few as 16 to 64
bits.
Keywords: visual document descriptor; compression; large-scale; retrieval; classification
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Anjan Dutta, Josep Llados and Umapada Pal. 2013. A symbol spotting approach in graphical documents by hashing serialized graphs. PR, 46(3), 752–768.
Abstract: In this paper we propose a symbol spotting technique in graphical documents. Graphs are used to represent the documents and a (sub)graph matching technique is used to detect the symbols in them. We propose a graph serialization to reduce the usual computational complexity of graph matching. Serialization of graphs is performed by computing acyclic graph paths between each pair of connected nodes. Graph paths are one-dimensional structures of graphs which are less expensive in terms of computation. At the same time they enable robust localization even in the presence of noise and distortion. Indexing in large graph databases involves a computational burden as well. We propose a graph factorization approach to tackle this problem. Factorization is intended to create a unified indexed structure over the database of graphical documents. Once graph paths are extracted, the entire database of graphical documents is indexed in hash tables by locality sensitive hashing (LSH) of shape descriptors of the paths. The hashing data structure aims to execute an approximate k-NN search in a sub-linear time. We have performed detailed experiments with various datasets of line drawings and compared our method with the state-of-the-art works. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our technique.
Keywords: Symbol spotting; Graphics recognition; Graph matching; Graph serialization; Graph factorization; Graph paths; Hashing
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Muhammad Muzzamil Luqman, Jean-Yves Ramel, Josep Llados and Thierry Brouard. 2013. Fuzzy Multilevel Graph Embedding. PR, 46(2), 551–565.
Abstract: Structural pattern recognition approaches offer the most expressive, convenient, powerful but computational expensive representations of underlying relational information. To benefit from mature, less expensive and efficient state-of-the-art machine learning models of statistical pattern recognition they must be mapped to a low-dimensional vector space. Our method of explicit graph embedding bridges the gap between structural and statistical pattern recognition. We extract the topological, structural and attribute information from a graph and encode numeric details by fuzzy histograms and symbolic details by crisp histograms. The histograms are concatenated to achieve a simple and straightforward embedding of graph into a low-dimensional numeric feature vector. Experimentation on standard public graph datasets shows that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods of graph embedding for richly attributed graphs.
Keywords: Pattern recognition; Graphics recognition; Graph clustering; Graph classification; Explicit graph embedding; Fuzzy logic
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Partha Pratim Roy, Umapada Pal, Josep Llados and Mathieu Nicolas Delalandre. 2012. Multi-oriented touching text character segmentation in graphical documents using dynamic programming. PR, 45(5), 1972–1983.
Abstract: 2,292 JCR
The touching character segmentation problem becomes complex when touching strings are multi-oriented. Moreover in graphical documents sometimes characters in a single-touching string have different orientations. Segmentation of such complex touching is more challenging. In this paper, we present a scheme towards the segmentation of English multi-oriented touching strings into individual characters. When two or more characters touch, they generate a big cavity region in the background portion. Based on the convex hull information, at first, we use this background information to find some initial points for segmentation of a touching string into possible primitives (a primitive consists of a single character or part of a character). Next, the primitives are merged to get optimum segmentation. A dynamic programming algorithm is applied for this purpose using the total likelihood of characters as the objective function. A SVM classifier is used to find the likelihood of a character. To consider multi-oriented touching strings the features used in the SVM are invariant to character orientation. Experiments were performed in different databases of real and synthetic touching characters and the results show that the method is efficient in segmenting touching characters of arbitrary orientations and sizes.
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