Abstract: The emergence of geometric deep learning as a novel framework to deal with graph-based representations has faded away traditional approaches in favor of completely new methodologies. In this paper, we propose a new framework able to combine the advances on deep metric learning with traditional approximations of the graph edit distance. Hence, we propose an efficient graph distance based on the novel field of geometric deep learning. Our method employs a message passing neural network to capture the graph structure, and thus, leveraging this information for its use on a distance computation. The performance of the proposed graph distance is validated on two different scenarios. On the one hand, in a graph retrieval of handwritten words~\ie~keyword spotting, showing its superior performance when compared with (approximate) graph edit distance benchmarks. On the other hand, demonstrating competitive results for graph similarity learning when compared with the current state-of-the-art on a recent benchmark dataset.

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.

Abstract: Many historical manuscripts that hold trustworthy memories of the past societies contain information organized in a structured layout (e.g. census, birth or marriage records). The precious information stored in these documents cannot be effectively used nor accessed without costly annotation efforts. The transcription driven by the semantic categories of words is crucial for the subsequent access. In this paper we describe an approach to extract information from structured historical handwritten text images and build a knowledge representation for the extraction of meaning out of historical data. The method extracts information, such as named entities, without the need of an intermediate transcription step, thanks to the incorporation of context information through language models. Our system has two variants, the first one is based on bigrams, whereas the second one is based on recurrent neural networks. Concretely, our second architecture integrates a Convolutional Neural Network to model visual information from word images together with a Bidirecitonal Long Short Term Memory network to model the relation among the words. This integrated sequential approach is able to extract more information than just the semantic category (e.g. a semantic category can be associated to a person in a record). Our system is generic, it deals with out-of-vocabulary words by design, and it can be applied to structured handwritten texts from different domains. The method has been validated with the ICDAR IEHHR competition protocol, outperforming the existing approaches.

Abstract: In this article, a form of the so-called word spotting-method is used on a large set of handwritten documents in order to identify those that contain script of similar execution. The point of departure for the investigation is the mediaeval Swedish manuscript Cod. Holm. D 3. The main scribe of this manuscript has yet not been identified in other documents. The current attempt aims at localising other documents that display a large degree of similarity in the characteristics of the script, these being possible candidates for being executed by the same hand. For this purpose, the method of word spotting has been employed, focusing on individual letters, and therefore the process is referred to as letter spotting in the article. In this process, a set of ‘g’:s, ‘h’:s and ‘k’:s have been selected as templates, and then a search has been made for close matches among the mediaeval Swedish charters. The search resulted in a number of charters that displayed great similarities with the manuscript D 3. The used letter spotting method thus proofed to be a very efficient sorting tool localising similar script samples.

Abstract: This paper explores the possibilities of image style transfer applied to text maintaining the original transcriptions. Results on different text domains (scene text, machine printed text and handwritten text) and cross-modal results demonstrate that this is feasible, and open different research lines. Furthermore, two architectures for selective style transfer, which means
transferring style to only desired image pixels, are proposed. Finally, scene text selective style transfer is evaluated as a data augmentation technique to expand scene text detection datasets, resulting in a boost of text detectors performance. Our implementation of the described models is publicly available.