2021 |
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Pau Torras, Arnau Baro, Lei Kang and Alicia Fornes. 2021. On the Integration of Language Models into Sequence to Sequence Architectures for Handwritten Music Recognition. International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference.690–696.
Abstract: Despite the latest advances in Deep Learning, the recognition of handwritten music scores is still a challenging endeavour. Even though the recent Sequence to Sequence(Seq2Seq) architectures have demonstrated its capacity to reliably recognise handwritten text, their performance is still far from satisfactory when applied to historical handwritten scores. Indeed, the ambiguous nature of handwriting, the non-standard musical notation employed by composers of the time and the decaying state of old paper make these scores remarkably difficult to read, sometimes even by trained humans. Thus, in this work we explore the incorporation of language models into a Seq2Seq-based architecture to try to improve transcriptions where the aforementioned unclear writing produces statistically unsound mistakes, which as far as we know, has never been attempted for this field of research on this architecture. After studying various Language Model integration techniques, the experimental evaluation on historical handwritten music scores shows a significant improvement over the state of the art, showing that this is a promising research direction for dealing with such difficult manuscripts.
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Pau Torras, Mohamed Ali Souibgui, Jialuo Chen and Alicia Fornes. 2021. A Transcription Is All You Need: Learning to Align through Attention. 14th IAPR International Workshop on Graphics Recognition.141–146. (LNCS.)
Abstract: Historical ciphered manuscripts are a type of document where graphical symbols are used to encrypt their content instead of regular text. Nowadays, expert transcriptions can be found in libraries alongside the corresponding manuscript images. However, those transcriptions are not aligned, so these are barely usable for training deep learning-based recognition methods. To solve this issue, we propose a method to align each symbol in the transcript of an image with its visual representation by using an attention-based Sequence to Sequence (Seq2Seq) model. The core idea is that, by learning to recognise symbols sequence within a cipher line image, the model also identifies their position implicitly through an attention mechanism. Thus, the resulting symbol segmentation can be later used for training algorithms. The experimental evaluation shows that this method is promising, especially taking into account the small size of the cipher dataset.
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Ruben Tito, Dimosthenis Karatzas and Ernest Valveny. 2021. Document Collection Visual Question Answering. 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.778–792. (LNCS.)
Abstract: Current tasks and methods in Document Understanding aims to process documents as single elements. However, documents are usually organized in collections (historical records, purchase invoices), that provide context useful for their interpretation. To address this problem, we introduce Document Collection Visual Question Answering (DocCVQA) a new dataset and related task, where questions are posed over a whole collection of document images and the goal is not only to provide the answer to the given question, but also to retrieve the set of documents that contain the information needed to infer the answer. Along with the dataset we propose a new evaluation metric and baselines which provide further insights to the new dataset and task.
Keywords: Document collection; Visual Question Answering
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Ruben Tito, Minesh Mathew, C.V. Jawahar, Ernest Valveny and Dimosthenis Karatzas. 2021. ICDAR 2021 Competition on Document Visual Question Answering. 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.635–649.
Abstract: In this report we present results of the ICDAR 2021 edition of the Document Visual Question Challenges. This edition complements the previous tasks on Single Document VQA and Document Collection VQA with a newly introduced on Infographics VQA. Infographics VQA is based on a new dataset of more than 5, 000 infographics images and 30, 000 question-answer pairs. The winner methods have scored 0.6120 ANLS in Infographics VQA task, 0.7743 ANLSL in Document Collection VQA task and 0.8705 ANLS in Single Document VQA. We present a summary of the datasets used for each task, description of each of the submitted methods and the results and analysis of their performance. A summary of the progress made on Single Document VQA since the first edition of the DocVQA 2020 challenge is also presented.
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Sanket Biswas, Pau Riba, Josep Llados and Umapada Pal. 2021. Beyond Document Object Detection: Instance-Level Segmentation of Complex Layouts. IJDAR, 24, 269–281.
Abstract: Information extraction is a fundamental task of many business intelligence services that entail massive document processing. Understanding a document page structure in terms of its layout provides contextual support which is helpful in the semantic interpretation of the document terms. In this paper, inspired by the progress of deep learning methodologies applied to the task of object recognition, we transfer these models to the specific case of document object detection, reformulating the traditional problem of document layout analysis. Moreover, we importantly contribute to prior arts by defining the task of instance segmentation on the document image domain. An instance segmentation paradigm is especially important in complex layouts whose contents should interact for the proper rendering of the page, i.e., the proper text wrapping around an image. Finally, we provide an extensive evaluation, both qualitative and quantitative, that demonstrates the superior performance of the proposed methodology over the current state of the art.
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Sanket Biswas, Pau Riba, Josep Llados and Umapada Pal. 2021. DocSynth: A Layout Guided Approach for Controllable Document Image Synthesis. 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.555–568. (LNCS.)
Abstract: Despite significant progress on current state-of-the-art image generation models, synthesis of document images containing multiple and complex object layouts is a challenging task. This paper presents a novel approach, called DocSynth, to automatically synthesize document images based on a given layout. In this work, given a spatial layout (bounding boxes with object categories) as a reference by the user, our proposed DocSynth model learns to generate a set of realistic document images consistent with the defined layout. Also, this framework has been adapted to this work as a superior baseline model for creating synthetic document image datasets for augmenting real data during training for document layout analysis tasks. Different sets of learning objectives have been also used to improve the model performance. Quantitatively, we also compare the generated results of our model with real data using standard evaluation metrics. The results highlight that our model can successfully generate realistic and diverse document images with multiple objects. We also present a comprehensive qualitative analysis summary of the different scopes of synthetic image generation tasks. Lastly, to our knowledge this is the first work of its kind.
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Sanket Biswas, Pau Riba, Josep Llados and Umapada Pal. 2021. Graph-Based Deep Generative Modelling for Document Layout Generation. 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.525–537. (LNCS.)
Abstract: One of the major prerequisites for any deep learning approach is the availability of large-scale training data. When dealing with scanned document images in real world scenarios, the principal information of its content is stored in the layout itself. In this work, we have proposed an automated deep generative model using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to generate synthetic data with highly variable and plausible document layouts that can be used to train document interpretation systems, in this case, specially in digital mailroom applications. It is also the first graph-based approach for document layout generation task experimented on administrative document images, in this case, invoices.
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2020 |
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Ali Furkan Biten. 2020. A Bitter-Sweet Symphony on Vision and Language: Bias and World Knowledge. (Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA.)
Abstract: Vision and Language are broadly regarded as cornerstones of intelligence. Even though language and vision have different aims – language having the purpose of communication, transmission of information and vision having the purpose of constructing mental representations around us to navigate and interact with objects – they cooperate and depend on one another in many tasks we perform effortlessly. This reliance is actively being studied in various Computer Vision tasks, e.g. image captioning, visual question answering, image-sentence retrieval, phrase grounding, just to name a few. All of these tasks share the inherent difficulty of the aligning the two modalities, while being robust to language
priors and various biases existing in the datasets. One of the ultimate goal for vision and language research is to be able to inject world knowledge while getting rid of the biases that come with the datasets. In this thesis, we mainly focus on two vision and language tasks, namely Image Captioning and Scene-Text Visual Question Answering (STVQA).
In both domains, we start by defining a new task that requires the utilization of world knowledge and in both tasks, we find that the models commonly employed are prone to biases that exist in the data. Concretely, we introduce new tasks and discover several problems that impede performance at each level and provide remedies or possible solutions in each chapter: i) We define a new task to move beyond Image Captioning to Image Interpretation that can utilize Named Entities in the form of world knowledge. ii) We study the object hallucination problem in classic Image Captioning systems and develop an architecture-agnostic solution. iii) We define a sub-task of Visual Question Answering that requires reading the text in the image (STVQA), where we highlight the limitations of current models. iv) We propose an architecture for the STVQA task that can point to the answer in the image and show how to combine it with classic VQA models. v) We show how far language can get us in STVQA and discover yet another bias which causes the models to disregard the image while doing Visual Question Answering.
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Alicia Fornes, Josep Llados and Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora. 2020. Browsing of the Social Network of the Past: Information Extraction from Population Manuscript Images. Handwritten Historical Document Analysis, Recognition, and Retrieval – State of the Art and Future Trends. World Scientific.
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Andres Mafla, Sounak Dey, Ali Furkan Biten, Lluis Gomez and Dimosthenis Karatzas. 2020. Fine-grained Image Classification and Retrieval by Combining Visual and Locally Pooled Textual Features. IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision.
Abstract: Text contained in an image carries high-level semantics that can be exploited to achieve richer image understanding. In particular, the mere presence of text provides strong guiding content that should be employed to tackle a diversity of computer vision tasks such as image retrieval, fine-grained classification, and visual question answering. In this paper, we address the problem of fine-grained classification and image retrieval by leveraging textual information along with visual cues to comprehend the existing intrinsic relation between the two modalities. The novelty of the proposed model consists of the usage of a PHOC descriptor to construct a bag of textual words along with a Fisher Vector Encoding that captures the morphology of text. This approach provides a stronger multimodal representation for this task and as our experiments demonstrate, it achieves state-of-the-art results on two different tasks, fine-grained classification and image retrieval.
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