Abstract: Date estimation of historical document images is a challenging problem, with several contributions in the literature that lack of the ability to generalize from one dataset to others. This paper presents a robust date estimation system based in a retrieval approach that generalizes well in front of heterogeneous collections. We use a ranking loss function named smooth-nDCG to train a Convolutional Neural Network that learns an ordination of documents for each problem. One of the main usages of the presented approach is as a tool for historical contextual retrieval. It means that scholars could perform comparative analysis of historical images from big datasets in terms of the period where they were produced. We provide experimental evaluation on different types of documents from real datasets of manuscript and newspaper images.

Abstract: Domain Adaptation methods can be classified into two basic families of approaches: non-parametric and parametric. Non-parametric approaches depend on statistical indicators such as feature covariances to minimize the domain shift. Non-parametric approaches tend to be fast to compute and require no additional parameters, but they are unable to leverage probability density functions with complex internal structures. Parametric approaches, on the other hand, use models of the probability distributions as surrogates in minimizing the domain shift, but they require additional trainable parameters to model these distributions. In this work, we propose a new statistical approach to minimizing the domain shift based on stochastically projecting and evaluating the cumulative density function in both domains. As with non-parametric approaches, there are no additional trainable parameters. As with parametric approaches, the internal structure of both domains’ probability distributions is considered, thus leveraging a higher amount of information when reducing the domain shift. Evaluation on standard datasets used for Domain Adaptation shows better performance of the proposed model compared to non-parametric approaches while being competitive with parametric ones. (Code available at: https://github.com/moliusimon/mca).

Abstract: This paper presents a novel attention based architecture to remove non-homogeneous haze. The proposed model is focused on obtaining the most representative characteristics of the image, at each learning cycle, by means of adaptive attention modules coupled with a residual learning convolutional network. The latter is based on the Res2Net model. The proposed architecture is trained with just a few set of images. Its performance is evaluated on a public benchmark—images from the non-homogeneous haze NTIRE 2021 challenge—and compared with state of the art approaches reaching the best result.

Abstract: In recent years, deep learning models have considerably advanced the performance of segmentation tasks on Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). However, these models show a considerable performance drop when they are evaluated on unseen data from a different distribution. Since annotation is often a hard and costly task requiring expert supervision, it is necessary to develop ways in which existing models can be adapted to the unseen domains without any additional labelled information. In this work, we explore one such technique which extends the CycleGAN [2] architecture to generate label-preserving data in the target domain. The synthetic target domain data is used to train the nn-UNet [3] framework for the task of multi-label segmentation. The experiments are conducted and evaluated on the dataset [1] provided in the ‘Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation’ challenge [23] for segmentation of vestibular schwannoma (VS) tumour and cochlea on contrast enhanced (ceT1) and high resolution (hrT2) MRI scans. In the proposed approach, our model obtains dice scores (DSC) 0.73 and 0.49 for tumour and cochlea respectively on the validation set of the dataset. This indicates the applicability of the proposed technique to real-world problems where data may be obtained by different acquisition protocols as in [1] where hrT2 images are more reliable, safer, and lower-cost alternative to ceT1.

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.

Abstract: This four-volume set of LNCS 12821, LNCS 12822, LNCS 12823 and LNCS 12824, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR 2021, held in Lausanne, Switzerland in September 2021. The 182 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 340 submissions, and are presented with 13 competition reports.
The papers are organized into the following topical sections: document analysis for literature search, document summarization and translation, multimedia document analysis, mobile text recognition, document analysis for social good, indexing and retrieval of documents, physical and logical layout analysis, recognition of tables and formulas, and natural language processing (NLP) for document understanding.

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.

Abstract: In this paper, we explore and evaluate the use of ranking-based objective functions for learning simultaneously a word string and a word image encoder. We consider retrieval frameworks in which the user expects a retrieval list ranked according to a defined relevance score. In the context of a word spotting problem, the relevance score has been set according to the string edit distance from the query string. We experimentally demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed model on query-by-string word spotting for both, handwritten and real scene word images. We also provide the results for query-by-example word spotting, although it is not the main focus of this work.