Pau Riba

Handwritten word spotting by inexact matching of grapheme graphs

This paper presents a graph-based word spotting for handwritten documents. Contrary to most word spotting techniques, which use statistical representations, we propose a structural representation suitable to be robust to the inherent deformations of handwriting. Attributed graphs are constructed using a part-based approach. Graphemes extracted from shape convexities are used as stable units of handwriting, and are associated to graph nodes. Then, spatial relations between them determine graph edges. Spotting is defined in terms of an error-tolerant graph matching using bipartite-graph matching algorithm. To make the method usable in large datasets, a graph indexing approach that makes use of binary embeddings is used as preprocessing. Historical documents are used as experimental framework. The approach is comparable to statistical ones in terms of time and memory requirements, especially when dealing with large document collections.

Large-Scale Graph Indexing Using Binary Embeddings of Node Contexts

Graph-based representations are experiencing a growing usage in visual recognition and retrieval due to their representational power in front of classical appearance-based representations in terms of feature vectors. Retrieving a query graph from a large dataset of graphs has the drawback of the high computational complexity required to compare the query and the target graphs. The most important property for a large-scale retrieval is the search time complexity to be sub-linear in the number of database examples. In this paper we propose a fast indexation formalism for graph retrieval. A binary embedding is defined as hashing keys for graph nodes. Given a database of labeled graphs, graph nodes are complemented with vectors of attributes representing their local context. Hence, each attribute counts the length of a walk of order k originated in a vertex with label l. Each attribute vector is converted to a binary code applying a binary-valued hash function. Therefore, graph retrieval is formulated in terms of finding target graphs in the database whose nodes have a small Hamming distance from the query nodes, easily computed with bitwise logical operators. As an application example, we validate the performance of the proposed methods in a handwritten word spotting scenario in images of historical documents.

e-Crowds: A Mobile Platform for Browsing and Searching in Historical Demography-Related Manuscripts

This paper presents a prototype system running on portable devices for browsing and word searching through historical handwritten document collections. The platform adapts the paradigm of eBook reading, where the narrative is not necessarily sequential, but centered on the user actions. The novelty is to replace digitally born books by digitized historical manuscripts of marriage licenses, so document analysis tasks are required in the browser. With an active reading paradigm, the user can cast queries of people names, so he/she can implicitly follow genealogical links. In addition, the system allows combined searches: the user can refine a search by adding more words to search. As a second contribution, the retrieval functionality involves as a core technology a word spotting module with an unified approach, which allows combined query searches, and also two input modalities: query-by-example, and query-by-string.

On the Influence of Key Point Encoding for Handwritten Word Spotting

In this paper we evaluate the influence of the selection of key points and the associated features in the performance of word spotting processes. In general, features can be extracted from a number of characteristic points like corners, contours, skeletons, maxima, minima, crossings, etc. A number of descriptors exist in the literature using different interest point detectors. But the intrinsic variability of handwriting vary strongly on the performance if the interest points are not stable enough. In this paper, we analyze the performance of different descriptors for local interest points. As benchmarking dataset we have used the Barcelona Marriage Database that contains handwritten records of marriages over five centuries.

Large-scale graph indexing using binary embeddings of node contexts for information spotting in document image databases

Abstract Graph-based representations are experiencing a growing usage in visual recognition and retrieval due to their representational power in front of classical appearance-based representations. However, retrieving a query graph from a large dataset of graphs implies a high computational complexity. The most important property for a large-scale retrieval is the search time complexity to be sub-linear in the number of database examples. With this aim, in this paper we propose a graph indexation formalism applied to visual retrieval. A binary embedding is defined as hashing keys for graph nodes. Given a database of labeled graphs, graph nodes are complemented with vectors of attributes representing their local context. Then, each attribute vector is converted to a binary code applying a binary-valued hash function. Therefore, graph retrieval is formulated in terms of finding target graphs in the database whose nodes have a small Hamming distance from the query nodes, easily computed with bitwise logical operators. As an application example, we validate the performance of the proposed methods in different real scenarios such as handwritten word spotting in images of historical documents or symbol spotting in architectural floor plans.

Towards the Alignment of Handwritten Music Scores

It is very common to find different versions of the same music work in archives of Opera Theaters. These differences correspond to modifications and annotations from the musicians. From the musicologist point of view, these variations are very interesting and deserve study. This paper explores the alignment of music scores as a tool for automatically detecting the passages that contain such differences. Given the difficulties in the recognition of handwritten music scores, our goal is to align the music scores and at the same time, avoid the recognition of music elements as much as possible. After removing the staff lines, braces and ties, the bar lines are detected. Then, the bar units are described as a whole using the Blurred Shape Model. The bar units alignment is performed by using Dynamic Time Warping. The analysis of the alignment path is used to detect the variations in the music scores. The method has been evaluated on a subset of the CVC-MUSCIMA dataset, showing encouraging results.

Error-Tolerant Coarse-to-Fine Matching Model for Hierarchical Graphs

Graph-based representations are effective tools to capture structural information from visual elements. However, retrieving a query graph from a large database of graphs implies a high computational complexity. Moreover, these representations are very sensitive to noise or small changes. In this work, a novel hierarchical graph representation is designed. Using graph clustering techniques adapted from graph-based social media analysis, we propose to generate a hierarchy able to deal with different levels of abstraction while keeping information about the topology. For the proposed representations, a coarse-to-fine matching method is defined. These approaches are validated using real scenarios such as classification of colour images and handwritten word spotting.

Towards the Recognition of Compound Music Notes in Handwritten Music Scores

The recognition of handwritten music scores still remains an open problem. The existing approaches can only deal with very simple handwritten scores mainly because of the variability in the handwriting style and the variability in the composition of groups of music notes (i.e. compound music notes). In this work we focus on this second problem and propose a method based on perceptual grouping for the recognition of compound music notes. Our method has been tested using several handwritten music scores of the CVC-MUSCIMA database and compared with a commercial Optical Music Recognition (OMR) software. Given that our method is learning-free, the obtained results are promising.