Abstract: Embedding data into vector spaces is a very popular strategy of pattern recognition methods. When distances between embeddings are quantized, performance metrics become ambiguous. In this paper, we present an analysis of the ambiguity quantized distances introduce and provide bounds on the effect. We demonstrate that it can have a measurable effect in empirical data in state-of-the-art systems. We also approach the phenomenon from a computer security perspective and demonstrate how someone being evaluated by a third party can exploit this ambiguity and greatly outperform a random predictor without even access to the input data. We also suggest a simple solution making the performance metrics, which rely on ranking, totally deterministic and impervious to such exploits.

Abstract: Many algorithms formulate graph matching as an optimization of an objective function of pairwise quantification of nodes and edges of two graphs to be matched. Pairwise measurements usually consider local attributes but disregard contextual information involved in graph structures. We address this issue by proposing contextual similarities between pairs of nodes. This is done by considering the tensor product graph (TPG) of two graphs to be matched, where each node is an ordered pair of nodes of the operand graphs. Contextual similarities between a pair of nodes are computed by accumulating weighted walks (normalized pairwise similarities) terminating at the corresponding paired node in TPG. Once the contextual similarities are obtained, we formulate subgraph matching as a node and edge selection problem in TPG. We use contextual similarities to construct an objective function and optimize it with a linear programming approach. Since random walk formulation through TPG takes into account higher order information, it is not a surprise that we obtain more reliable similarities and better discrimination among the nodes and edges. Experimental results shown on synthetic as well as real benchmarks illustrate that higher order contextual similarities increase discriminating power and allow one to find approximate solutions to the subgraph matching problem.

Abstract: In the last years, the interest in Optical Music Recognition (OMR) has reawakened, especially since the appearance of deep learning. However, there are very few works addressing handwritten scores. In this work we describe a full OMR pipeline for handwritten music scores by using Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks that could serve as a baseline for the research community.

Abstract: In this paper, we explore the use of second-order derivatives to detect text lines on handwritten document images. Taking advantage that the second derivative gives a minimum response when a dark linear element over a
bright background has the same orientation as the filter, we use this operator to create a map with the local orientation and strength of putative text lines in the document. Then, we detect line segments by selecting and merging the filter responses that have a similar orientation and scale. Finally, text lines are found by merging the segments that are within the same text region. The proposed segmentation algorithm, is learning-free while showing a performance similar to the state of the art methods in publicly available datasets.

Abstract: Text understanding in scene images has gained plenty of attention in the computer vision community and it is an important task in many applications as text carries semantically rich information about scene content and context. For instance, reading text in a scene can be applied to autonomous driving, scene understanding or assisting visually impaired people. The general aim of scene text understanding is to localize and recognize text in scene images. Text regions are first localized in the original image by a trained detector model and afterwards fed into a recognition module. The tasks of localization and recognition are highly correlated since an inaccurate localization can affect the recognition task.
The main purpose of this thesis is to devise efficient methods for scene text understanding. We investigate how the latest results on deep learning can advance text understanding pipelines. Recently, Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) and derived methods have achieved a significant performance on semantic segmentation and pixel level classification tasks. Therefore, we took benefit of the strengths of FCN approaches in order to detect text in natural scenes. In this thesis we have focused on two challenging tasks of scene text understanding which are Text Detection and Word Spotting. For the task of text detection, we have proposed an efficient text proposal technique in scene images. We have considered the Text Proposals method as the baseline which is an approach to reduce the search space of possible text regions in an image. In order to improve the Text Proposals method we combined it with Fully Convolutional Networks to efficiently reduce the number of proposals while maintaining the same level of accuracy and thus gaining a significant speed up. Our experiments demonstrate that this text proposal approach yields significantly higher recall rates than the line based text localization techniques, while also producing better-quality localization. We have also applied this technique on compressed images such as videos from wearable egocentric cameras. For the task of word spotting, we have introduced a novel mid-level word representation method. We have proposed a technique to create and exploit an intermediate representation of images based on text attributes which roughly correspond to character probability maps. Our representation extends the concept of Pyramidal Histogram Of Characters (PHOC) by exploiting Fully Convolutional Networks to derive a pixel-wise mapping of the character distribution within candidate word regions. We call this representation the Soft-PHOC. Furthermore, we show how to use Soft-PHOC descriptors for word spotting tasks through an efficient text line proposal algorithm. To evaluate the detected text, we propose a novel line based evaluation along with the classic bounding box based approach. We test our method on incidental scene text images which comprises real-life scenarios such as urban scenes. The importance of incidental scene text images is due to the complexity of backgrounds, perspective, variety of script and language, short text and little linguistic context. All of these factors together makes the incidental scene text images challenging.