Abstract: Nowadays, automatic identity document recognition, including passport and driving license recognition, is at the core of many applications within the administrative and service sectors, such as police, hospitality, car renting, etc. In former years, the document information was manually extracted whereas today this data is recognized automatically from images obtained by flat-bed scanners. Yet, since these scanners tend to be expensive and voluminous, companies in the sector have recently turned their attention to cheaper, small and yet computationally powerful scanners: the mobile devices. The document identity recognition from mobile images enclose several new difficulties w.r.t traditional scanned images, such as the loss of a controlled background, perspective, blurring, etc. In this paper we present a real application for identity document classification of images taken from mobile devices. This classification process is of extreme importance since a prior knowledge of the document type and origin strongly facilitates the subsequent information extraction. The proposed method is based on a traditional Bagof-Words in which we have taken into consideration several key aspects to enhance recognition rate. The method performance has been studied on three datasets containing more than 2000 images from 129 different document classes.

Abstract: Nowadays, document forgery is becoming a real issue. A large amount of documents that contain critical information as payment slips, invoices or contracts, are constantly subject to fraudster manipulation because of the lack of security regarding this kind of document. Previously, a system to detect fraudulent documents based on its intrinsic features has been presented. It was especially designed to retrieve copy-move forgery and imperfection due to fraudster manipulation. However, when a set of characters is not present in the original document, copy-move forgery is not feasible. Hence, the fraudster will use a text toolbox to add or modify information in the document by imitating the font or he will cut and paste characters from another document where the font properties are similar. This often results in font type errors. Thus, a clue to detect document forgery consists of finding characters, words or sentences in a document with font properties different from their surroundings. To this end, we present in this paper an automatic forgery detection method based on document font features. Using the Conditional Random Field a measurement of probability that a character belongs to a specific font is made by comparing the character font features to a knowledge database. Then, the character is classified as a genuine or a fake one by comparing its probability to belong to a certain font type with those of the neighboring characters.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new approach for symbol description. Our method is built based on the combination of shape context of interest points descriptor and sparse representation. More specifically, we first learn a dictionary describing shape context of interest point descriptors. Then, based on information retrieval techniques, we build a vector model for each symbol based on its sparse representation in a visual vocabulary whose visual words are columns in the learneddictionary. The retrieval task is performed by ranking symbols based on similarity between vector models. Evaluation of our method, using benchmark datasets, demonstrates the validity of our approach and shows that it outperforms related state-of-theart methods.

Abstract: Historical documents suffer from different types of degradation and noise such as background variation, uneven illumination or dark spots. In case of double-sided documents, another common problem is that the back side of the document usually interferes with the front side because of the transparency of the document or ink bleeding. This effect is called the show through phenomenon. Many methods are developed to solve these problems, and in the case of show-through, by scanning and matching both the front and back sides of the document. In contrast, our approach is designed to use only one side of the scanned document. We hypothesize that show-trough are low contrast components, while foreground components are high contrast ones. A Multiresolution Contrast (MC) decomposition is presented in order to estimate the contrast of features at different spatial scales. We cancel the show-through phenomenon by thresholding these low contrast components. This decomposition is also able to enhance the image removing shadowed areas by weighting spatial scales. Results show that the enhanced images improve the readability of the documents, allowing scholars both to recover unreadable words and to solve ambiguities.

Abstract: The first competition on music scores that was organized at ICDAR in 2011 awoke the interest of researchers, who participated both at staff removal and writer identification tasks. In this second edition, we focus on the staff removal task and simulate a real case scenario: old music scores. For this purpose, we have generated a new set of images using two kinds of degradations: local noise and 3D distortions. This paper describes the dataset, distortion methods, evaluation metrics, the participant's methods and the obtained results.