Design of an Offline Handwriting Recognition System Tested on the Bangla and Korean Scripts

This dissertation presents a flexible and robust offline handwriting recognition system which is tested on the Bangla and Korean scripts. Offline handwriting recognition is one of the most challenging and yet to be solved problems in machine learning. While a few popular scripts (like Latin) have received a lot of attention, many other widely used scripts (like Bangla) have seen very little progress. Features such as connectedness and vowels structured as diacritics make it a challenging script to recognize. A simple and robust design for offline recognition is presented which not only works reliably, but also can be used for almost any alphabetic writing system. The framework has been rigorously tested for Bangla and demonstrated how it can be transformed to apply to other scripts through experiments on the Korean script whose two-dimensional arrangement of characters makes it a challenge to recognize. The base of this design is a character spotting network which detects the location of different script elements (such as characters, diacritics) from an unsegmented word image. A transcript is formed from the detected classes based on their corresponding location information. This is the first reported lexicon-free offline recognition system for Bangla and achieves a Character Recognition Accuracy (CRA) of 94.8%. This is also one of the most flexible architectures ever presented. Recognition of Korean was achieved with a 91.2% CRA. Also, a powerful technique of autonomous tagging was developed which can drastically reduce the effort of preparing a dataset for any script. The combination of the character spotting method and the autonomous tagging brings the entire offline recognition problem very close to a singular solution. Additionally, a database named the Boise State Bangla Handwriting Dataset was developed. This is one of the richest offline datasets currently available for Bangla and this has been made publicly accessible to accelerate the research progress. Many other tools were developed and experiments were conducted to more rigorously validate this framework by evaluating the method against external datasets (CMATERdb 1.1.1, Indic Word Dataset and REID2019: Early Indian Printed Documents). Offline handwriting recognition is an extremely promising technology and the outcome of this research moves the field significantly ahead

Nonlinear Parametric and Neural Network Modelling for Medical Image Classification

System identification and artificial neural networks (ANN) are families of algorithms used in systems engineering and machine learning respectively that use structure detection and learning strategies to build models of complex systems by taking advantage of input-output type data. These models play an essential role in science and engineering because they fill the gap in those cases where we know the input-output behaviour of a system, but there is not a mathematical model to understand and predict its changes in future or even prevent threats. In this context, the nonlinear approximation of systems is nowadays very popular since it better describes complex instances. On the other hand, digital image processing is an area of systems engineering that is expanding the analysis dimension level in a variety of real-life problems while it is becoming more attractive and affordable over time. Medicine has made the most of it by supporting important human decision-making processes through computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems. This thesis presents three different frameworks for breast cancer detection, with approaches ranging from nonlinear system identification, nonlinear system identification coupled with simple neural networks, to multilayer neural networks. In particular, the nonlinear system identification approaches termed the Nonlinear AutoRegressive with eXogenous inputs (NARX) model and the MultiScales Radial Basis Function (MSRBF) neural networks appear for the first time in image processing. Along with the above contributions takes place the presentation of the Multilayer-Fuzzy Extreme Learning Machine (ML-FELM) neural network for faster training and more accurate image classification. A central research aim is to take advantage of nonlinear system identification and multilayer neural networks to enhance the feature extraction process, while the classification in CAD systems is bolstered. In the case of multilayer neural networks, the extraction is carried throughout stacked autoencoders, a bottleneck network architecture that promotes a data transformation between layers. In the case of nonlinear system identification, the goal is to add flexible models capable of capturing distinctive features from digital images that might be shortly recognised by simpler approaches. The purpose of detecting nonlinearities in digital images is complementary to that of linear models since the goal is to extract features in greater depth, in which both linear and nonlinear elements can be captured. This aim is relevant because, accordingly to previous work cited in the first chapter, not all spatial relationships existing in digital images can be explained appropriately with linear dependencies. Experimental results show that the methodologies based on system identification produced reliable images models with customised mathematical structure. The models came to include nonlinearities in different proportions, depending upon the case under examination. The information about nonlinearity and model structure was used as part of the whole image model. It was found that, in some instances, the models from different clinical classes in the breast cancer detection problem presented a particular structure. For example, NARX models of the malignant class showed higher non-linearity percentage and depended more on exogenous inputs compared to other classes. Regarding classification performance, comparisons of the three new CAD systems with existing methods had variable results. As for the NARX model, its performance was superior in three cases but was overcame in two. However, the comparison must be taken with caution since different databases were used. The MSRBF model was better in 5 out of 6 cases and had superior specificity in all instances, overcoming in 3.5% the closest model in this line. The ML-FELM model was the best in 6 out of 6 cases, although it was defeated in accuracy by 0.6% in one case and specificity in 0.22% in another one

Very High Resolution (VHR) Satellite Imagery: Processing and Applications

Recently, growing interest in the use of remote sensing imagery has appeared to provide synoptic maps of water quality parameters in coastal and inner water ecosystems;, monitoring of complex land ecosystems for biodiversity conservation; precision agriculture for the management of soils, crops, and pests; urban planning; disaster monitoring, etc. However, for these maps to achieve their full potential, it is important to engage in periodic monitoring and analysis of multi-temporal changes. In this context, very high resolution (VHR) satellite-based optical, infrared, and radar imaging instruments provide reliable information to implement spatially-based conservation actions. Moreover, they enable observations of parameters of our environment at greater broader spatial and finer temporal scales than those allowed through field observation alone. In this sense, recent very high resolution satellite technologies and image processing algorithms present the opportunity to develop quantitative techniques that have the potential to improve upon traditional techniques in terms of cost, mapping fidelity, and objectivity. Typical applications include multi-temporal classification, recognition and tracking of specific patterns, multisensor data fusion, analysis of land/marine ecosystem processes and environment monitoring, etc. This book aims to collect new developments, methodologies, and applications of very high resolution satellite data for remote sensing. The works selected provide to the research community the most recent advances on all aspects of VHR satellite remote sensing

Low-Resource Unsupervised NMT:Diagnosing the Problem and Providing a Linguistically Motivated Solution

Unsupervised Machine Translation hasbeen advancing our ability to translatewithout parallel data, but state-of-the-artmethods assume an abundance of mono-lingual data. This paper investigates thescenario where monolingual data is lim-ited as well, finding that current unsuper-vised methods suffer in performance un-der this stricter setting. We find that theperformance loss originates from the poorquality of the pretrained monolingual em-beddings, and we propose using linguis-tic information in the embedding train-ing scheme. To support this, we look attwo linguistic features that may help im-prove alignment quality: dependency in-formation and sub-word information. Us-ing dependency-based embeddings resultsin a complementary word representationwhich offers a boost in performance ofaround 1.5 BLEU points compared to stan-dardWORD2VECwhen monolingual datais limited to 1 million sentences per lan-guage. We also find that the inclusion ofsub-word information is crucial to improv-ing the quality of the embedding

Machine Learning Algorithm for the Scansion of Old Saxon Poetry

Several scholars designed tools to perform the automatic scansion of poetry in many languages, but none of these tools deal with Old Saxon or Old English. This project aims to be a first attempt to create a tool for these languages. We implemented a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) model to perform the automatic scansion of Old Saxon and Old English poems. Since this model uses supervised learning, we manually annotated the Heliand manuscript, and we used the resulting corpus as labeled dataset to train the model. The evaluation of the performance of the algorithm reached a 97% for the accuracy and a 99% of weighted average for precision, recall and F1 Score. In addition, we tested the model with some verses from the Old Saxon Genesis and some from The Battle of Brunanburh, and we observed that the model predicted almost all Old Saxon metrical patterns correctly misclassified the majority of the Old English input verses

Nostratic Dictionary

A revised edition can be found at http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/244080.Aharon Dolgopolsky is the leading authority on the Nostratic macrofamily. His 'Nostratic Dictionary' presented here is, of course, something very much more than a dictionary. It is the most thorough and extensive demonstration and documentation so far of what may be termed the Nostratic hypothesis: that several of the world's best- known language families are related in their origin, their grammar and their lexicon, and that they belong together in a larger unit, of earlier origin, the Nostratic macrofamily. It should at once be noted that several elements of this enterprise are controversial. For while the Nostratic hypothesis has many supporters, it has been criticized on rather fundamental grounds by a number of distinguished linguists. The matter was reviewed some years ago in a symposium held at the McDonald Institute, and positions remain very much polarized. It was a result of that meeting that the decision was taken to invite Aharon Dolgopolsky to publish his Dictionary - a much more substantial treatise than any work hitherto undertaken on the subject - at the McDonald Institute. For it became clear that the diversities of view expressed at that symposium were not likely to be resolved by further polemical exchanges. Instead, a substantial body of data was required, whose examination and evaluation could subsequently lead to more mature judgments. Those data are presented here, and that more mature evaluation can now proceed.McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research Alfred P. Sloan Foundatio