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Lei Kang, Pau Riba, Yaxing Wang, Marçal Rusiñol, Alicia Fornes and Mauricio Villegas. 2020. GANwriting: Content-Conditioned Generation of Styled Handwritten Word Images. 16th European Conference on Computer Vision.
Abstract: Although current image generation methods have reached impressive quality levels, they are still unable to produce plausible yet diverse images of handwritten words. On the contrary, when writing by hand, a great variability is observed across different writers, and even when analyzing words scribbled by the same individual, involuntary variations are conspicuous. In this work, we take a step closer to producing realistic and varied artificially rendered handwritten words. We propose a novel method that is able to produce credible handwritten word images by conditioning the generative process with both calligraphic style features and textual content. Our generator is guided by three complementary learning objectives: to produce realistic images, to imitate a certain handwriting style and to convey a specific textual content. Our model is unconstrained to any predefined vocabulary, being able to render whatever input word. Given a sample writer, it is also able to mimic its calligraphic features in a few-shot setup. We significantly advance over prior art and demonstrate with qualitative, quantitative and human-based evaluations the realistic aspect of our synthetically produced images.
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Lluis Gomez, Anguelos Nicolaou, Marçal Rusiñol and Dimosthenis Karatzas. 2020. 12 years of ICDAR Robust Reading Competitions: The evolution of reading systems for unconstrained text understanding. In K. Alahari and C.V. Jawahar, eds. Visual Text Interpretation – Algorithms and Applications in Scene Understanding and Document Analysis. Springer. (Series on Advances in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.)
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Lluis Gomez, Dena Bazazian and Dimosthenis Karatzas. 2020. Historical review of scene text detection research. In K. Alahari and C.V. Jawahar, eds. Visual Text Interpretation – Algorithms and Applications in Scene Understanding and Document Analysis. Springer. (Series on Advances in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.)
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Manuel Carbonell. 2020. Neural Information Extraction from Semi-structured Documents A. (Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey.)
Abstract: Sectors as fintech, legaltech or insurance process an inflow of millions of forms, invoices, id documents, claims or similar every day. Together with these, historical archives provide gigantic amounts of digitized documents containing useful information that needs to be stored in machine encoded text with a meaningful structure. This procedure, known as information extraction (IE) comprises the steps of localizing and recognizing text, identifying named entities contained in it and optionally finding relationships among its elements. In this work we explore multi-task neural models at image and graph level to solve all steps in a unified way. While doing so we find benefits and limitations of these end-to-end approaches in comparison with sequential separate methods. More specifically, we first propose a method to produce textual as well as semantic labels with a unified model from handwritten text line images. We do so with the use of a convolutional recurrent neural model trained with connectionist temporal classification to predict the textual as well as semantic information encoded in the images. Secondly, motivated by the success of this approach we investigate the unification of the localization and recognition tasks of handwritten text in full pages with an end-to-end model, observing benefits in doing so. Having two models that tackle information extraction subsequent task pairs in an end-to-end to end manner, we lastly contribute with a method to put them all together in a single neural network to solve the whole information extraction pipeline in a unified way. Doing so we observe some benefits and some limitations in the approach, suggesting that in certain cases it is beneficial to train specialized models that excel at a single challenging task of the information extraction process, as it can be the recognition of named entities or the extraction of relationships between them. For this reason we lastly study the use of the recently arrived graph neural network architectures for the semantic tasks of the information extraction process, which are recognition of named entities and relation extraction, achieving promising results on the relation extraction part.
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Manuel Carbonell, Alicia Fornes, Mauricio Villegas and Josep Llados. 2020. A Neural Model for Text Localization, Transcription and Named Entity Recognition in Full Pages. PRL, 136, 219–227.
Abstract: In the last years, the consolidation of deep neural network architectures for information extraction in document images has brought big improvements in the performance of each of the tasks involved in this process, consisting of text localization, transcription, and named entity recognition. However, this process is traditionally performed with separate methods for each task. In this work we propose an end-to-end model that combines a one stage object detection network with branches for the recognition of text and named entities respectively in a way that shared features can be learned simultaneously from the training error of each of the tasks. By doing so the model jointly performs handwritten text detection, transcription, and named entity recognition at page level with a single feed forward step. We exhaustively evaluate our approach on different datasets, discussing its advantages and limitations compared to sequential approaches. The results show that the model is capable of benefiting from shared features by simultaneously solving interdependent tasks.
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Manuel Carbonell, Pau Riba, Mauricio Villegas, Alicia Fornes and Josep Llados. 2020. Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction with Graph Neural Networks in Semi Structured Documents. 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition.
Abstract: The use of administrative documents to communicate and leave record of business information requires of methods
able to automatically extract and understand the content from
such documents in a robust and efficient way. In addition,
the semi-structured nature of these reports is specially suited
for the use of graph-based representations which are flexible
enough to adapt to the deformations from the different document
templates. Moreover, Graph Neural Networks provide the proper
methodology to learn relations among the data elements in
these documents. In this work we study the use of Graph
Neural Network architectures to tackle the problem of entity
recognition and relation extraction in semi-structured documents.
Our approach achieves state of the art results in the three
tasks involved in the process. Additionally, the experimentation
with two datasets of different nature demonstrates the good
generalization ability of our approach.
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Minesh Mathew, Ruben Tito, Dimosthenis Karatzas, R.Manmatha and C.V. Jawahar. 2020. Document Visual Question Answering Challenge 2020. 33rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition – Short paper.
Abstract: This paper presents results of Document Visual Question Answering Challenge organized as part of “Text and Documents in the Deep Learning Era” workshop, in CVPR 2020. The challenge introduces a new problem – Visual Question Answering on document images. The challenge comprised two tasks. The first task concerns with asking questions on a single document image. On the other hand, the second task is set as a retrieval task where the question is posed over a collection of images. For the task 1 a new dataset is introduced comprising 50,000 questions-answer(s) pairs defined over 12,767 document images. For task 2 another dataset has been created comprising 20 questions over 14,362 document images which share the same document template.
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Mohamed Ali Souibgui, Y.Kessentini and Alicia Fornes. 2020. A conditional GAN based approach for distorted camera captured documents recovery. 4th Mediterranean Conference on Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence.
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Oriol Ramos Terrades, Albert Berenguel and Debora Gil. 2020. A flexible outlier detector based on a topology given by graph communities.
Abstract: Outlier, or anomaly, detection is essential for optimal performance of machine learning methods and statistical predictive models. It is not just a technical step in a data cleaning process but a key topic in many fields such as fraudulent document detection, in medical applications and assisted diagnosis systems or detecting security threats. In contrast to population-based methods, neighborhood based local approaches are simple flexible methods that have the potential to perform well in small sample size unbalanced problems. However, a main concern of local approaches is the impact that the computation of each sample neighborhood has on the method performance. Most approaches use a distance in the feature space to define a single neighborhood that requires careful selection of several parameters. This work presents a local approach based on a local measure of the heterogeneity of sample labels in the feature space considered as a topological manifold. Topology is computed using the communities of a weighted graph codifying mutual nearest neighbors in the feature space. This way, we provide with a set of multiple neighborhoods able to describe the structure of complex spaces without parameter fine tuning. The extensive experiments on real-world data sets show that our approach overall outperforms, both, local and global strategies in multi and single view settings.
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Pau Riba. 2020. Distilling Structure from Imagery: Graph-based Models for the Interpretation of Document Images. (Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey.)
Abstract: From its early stages, the community of Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision has considered the importance of leveraging the structural information when understanding images. Usually, graphs have been proposed as a suitable model to represent this kind of information due to their flexibility and representational power able to codify both, the components, objects, or entities and their pairwise relationship. Even though graphs have been successfully applied to a huge variety of tasks, as a result of their symbolic and relational nature, graphs have always suffered from some limitations compared to statistical approaches. Indeed, some trivial mathematical operations do not have an equivalence in the graph domain. For instance, in the core of many pattern recognition applications, there is a need to compare two objects. This operation, which is trivial when considering feature vectors defined in \(\mathbb{R}^n\), is not properly defined for graphs.
In this thesis, we have investigated the importance of the structural information from two perspectives, the traditional graph-based methods and the new advances on Geometric Deep Learning. On the one hand, we explore the problem of defining a graph representation and how to deal with it on a large scale and noisy scenario. On the other hand, Graph Neural Networks are proposed to first redefine a Graph Edit Distance methodologies as a metric learning problem, and second, to apply them in a real use case scenario for the detection of repetitive patterns which define tables in invoice documents. As experimental framework, we have validated the different methodological contributions in the domain of Document Image Analysis and Recognition.
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