A Multi-Feature Selection Approach for Gender Identification of Handwriting based on Kernel Mutual Information

This paper presents a new flexible approach to predict the gender of the writers from their handwriting samples. Handwriting features like slant, curvature, line separation, chain code, character shapes, and more, can be extracted from different methods. Therefore, the multi-feature sets are irrelevant and redundant. The conflict of the features exists in the sets, which affects the accuracy of classification and the computing cost. This paper proposes an approach, named Kernel Mutual Information (KMI), that focuses on feature selection. The KMI approach can decrease redundancies and conflicts. In addition, it extracts an optimal subset of features from the writing samples produced by male and female writers. To ensure that KMI can apply the various features, this paper describes the handwriting segmentation and handwritten text recognition technology used. The classification is carried out using a Support Vector Machine (SVM) on two databases. The first database comes from the ICDAR 2013 competition on gender prediction, which provides the samples in both Arabic and English. The other database contains the Registration-Document-Form (RDF) database in Chinese. The proposed and compared methods were evaluated on both databases. Results from the methods highlight the importance of feature selection for gender prediction from handwriting

정렬 특성들 기반의 문서 및 장면 텍스트 영상 평활화 기법

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 공과대학 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2017. 8. 조남익.카메라로 촬영한 텍스트 영상에 대해서, 광학 문자 인식(OCR)은 촬영된 장면을 분석하는데 있어서 매우 중요하다. 하지만 올바른 텍스트 영역 검출 후에도, 촬영한 영상에 대한 문자 인식은 여전히 어려운 문제로 여겨진다. 이는 종이의 구부러짐과 카메라 시점에 의한 기하학적인 왜곡 때문이고, 따라서 이러한 텍스트 영상에 대한 평활화는 문자 인식에 있어서 필수적인 전처리 과정으로 여겨진다. 이를 위한 왜곡된 촬영 영상을 정면 시점으로 복원하는 텍스트 영상 평활화 방법들은 활발히 연구되어지고 있다. 최근에는, 평활화가 잘 된 텍스트의 성질에 초점을 맞춘 연구들이 주로 진행되고 있다. 이러한 관점에서, 본 학위 논문은 텍스트 영상 평활화를 위하여 새로운 정렬 특성들을 다룬다. 이러한 정렬 특성들은 비용 함수로 설계되어지고, 비용 함수를 최소화하는 방법을 통해서 평활화에 사용되어지는 평활화 변수들이 구해진다. 본 학위 논문은 문서 영상 평활화, 장면 텍스트 평활화, 일반 배경 속의 휘어진 표면 평활화와 같이 3가지 세부 주제로 나눠진다. 첫 번째로, 본 학위 논문은 텍스트 라인들과 선분들의 정렬 특성에 기반의 문서 영상 평활화 방법을 제안한다. 기존의 텍스트 라인 기반의 문서 영상 평활화 방법들의 경우, 문서가 복잡한 레이아웃 형태이거나 적은 수의 텍스트 라인을 포함하고 있을 때 문제가 발생한다. 이는 문서에 텍스트 대신 그림, 그래프 혹은 표와 같은 영역이 많은 경우이다. 따라서 레이아웃에 강인한 문서 영상 평활화를 위하여 제안하는 방법은 정렬된 텍스트 라인뿐만 아니라 선분들도 이용한다. 올바르게 평활화 된 선분들은 여전히 일직선의 형태이고, 대부분 가로 혹은 세로 방향으로 정렬되어 있다는 가정 및 관측에 근거하여, 제안하는 방법은 이러한 성질들을 수식화하고 이를 텍스트 라인 기반의 비용 함수와 결합한다. 그리고 비용 함수를 최소화 하는 방법을 통해, 제안하는 방법은 종이의 구부러짐, 카메라 시점, 초점 거리와 같은 평활화 변수들을 추정한다. 또한, 오검출된 텍스트 라인들과 임의의 방향을 가지는 선분들과 같은 이상점(outlier)을 고려하여, 제안하는 방법은 반복적인 단계로 설계된다. 각 단계에서, 정렬 특성을 만족하지 않는 이상점들은 제거되고, 제거되지 않은 텍스트 라인 및 선분들만이 비용함수 최적화에 이용된다. 수행한 실험 결과들은 제안하는 방법이 다양한 레이아웃에 대하여 강인함을 보여준다. 두 번째로는, 본 논문은 장면 텍스트 평활화 방법을 제안한다. 기존 장면 텍스트 평활화 방법들의 경우, 가로/세로 방향의 획, 대칭 형태와 같은 문자가 가지는 고유의 생김새에 관련된 특성을 이용한다. 하지만, 이러한 방법들은 문자들의 정렬 형태는 고려하지 않고, 각각 개별 문자에 대한 특성들만을 이용하기 때문에 여러 문자들로 구성된 텍스트에 대해서 잘 정렬되지 않은 결과를 출력한다. 이러한 문제점을 해결하기 위하여, 제안하는 방법은 문자들의 정렬 정보를 이용한다. 정확하게는, 문자 고유의 모양뿐만 아니라 정렬 특성들도 함께 비용함수로 수식화되고, 비용함수를 최소화하는 방법을 통해서 평활화가 진행된다. 또한, 문자들의 정렬 특성을 수식화하기 위하여, 제안하는 방법은 텍스트를 각각 개별 문자들로 분리하는 문자 분리 또한 수행한다. 그 뒤, 텍스트의 위, 아래 선들을 RANSAC 알고리즘을 이용한 최소 제곱법을 통해 추정한다. 즉, 전체 알고리즘은 문자 분리와 선 추정, 평활화가 반복적으로 수행된다. 제안하는 비용함수는 볼록(convex)형태가 아니고 또한 많은 변수들을 포함하고 있기 때문에, 이를 최적화하기 위하여 Augmented Lagrange Multiplier 방법을 이용한다. 제안하는 방법은 일반 촬영 영상과 합성된 텍스트 영상을 통해 실험이 진행되었고, 실험 결과들은 제안하는 방법이 기존 방법들에 비하여 높은 인식 성능을 보이면서 동시에 시각적으로도 좋은 결과를 보임을 보여준다. 마지막으로, 제안하는 방법은 일반 배경 속의 휘어진 표면 평활화 방법으로도 확장된다. 일반 배경에 대해서, 약병이나 음료수 캔과 같이 원통 형태의 물체는 많이 존재한다. 그들의 표면은 일반 원통 표면(GCS)으로 모델링이 가능하다. 이러한 휘어진 표면들은 많은 문자와 그림들을 포함하고 있지만, 포함된 문자는 문서에 비해서 매우 불규칙적인 구조를 가지고 있다. 따라서 기존의 문서 영상 평활화 방법들로는 일반 배경 속 휘어진 표면 영상을 평활화하기 힘들다. 많은 휘어진 표면은 잘 정렬된 선분들 (테두리 선 혹은 바코드)을 포함하고 있다는 관측에 근거하여, 제안하는 방법은 앞서 제안한 선분들에 대한 함수를 이용하여 휘어진 표면을 평활화한다. 다양한 둥근 물체의 휘어진 표면 영상들에 대한 실험 결과들은 제안하는 방법이 평활화를 정확하게 수행함을 보여준다.The optical character recognition (OCR) of text images captured by cameras plays an important role for scene understanding. However, the OCR of camera-captured image is still considered a challenging problem, even after the text detection (localization). It is mainly due to the geometric distortions caused by page curve and perspective view, therefore their rectification has been an essential pre-processing step for their recognition. Thus, there have been many text image rectification methods which recover the fronto-parallel view image from a single distorted image. Recently, many researchers have focused on the properties of the well-rectified text. In this respect, this dissertation presents novel alignment properties for text image rectification, which are encoded into the proposed cost functions. By minimizing the cost functions, the transformation parameters for rectification are obtained. In detail, they are applied to three topics: document image dewarping, scene text rectification, and curved surface dewarping in real scene. First, a document image dewarping method is proposed based on the alignments of text-lines and line segments. Conventional text-line based document dewarping methods have problems when handling complex layout and/or very few text-lines. When there are few aligned text-lines in the image, this usually means that photos, graphics and/or tables take large portion of the input instead. Hence, for the robust document dewarping, the proposed method uses line segments in the image in addition to the aligned text-lines. Based on the assumption and observation that all the transformed line segments are still straight (line to line mapping), and many of them are horizontally or vertically aligned in the well-rectified images, the proposed method encodes this properties into the cost function in addition to the text-line based cost. By minimizing the function, the proposed method can obtain transformation parameters for page curve, camera pose, and focal length, which are used for document image rectification. Considering that there are many outliers in line segment directions and miss-detected text-lines in some cases, the overall algorithm is designed in an iterative manner. At each step, the proposed method removes the text-lines and line segments that are not well aligned, and then minimizes the cost function with the updated information. Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust to the variety of page layouts. This dissertation also presents a method for scene text rectification. Conventional methods for scene text rectification mainly exploited the glyph property, which means that the characters in many language have horizontal/vertical strokes and also some symmetric shapes. However, since they consider the only shape properties of individual character, without considering the alignments of characters, they work well for only images with a single character, and still yield mis-aligned results for images with multiple characters. In order to alleviate this problem, the proposed method explicitly imposes alignment constraints on rectified results. To be precise, character alignments as well as glyph properties are encoded in the proposed cost function, and the transformation parameters are obtained by minimizing the function. Also, in order to encode the alignments of characters into the cost function, the proposed method separates the text into individual characters using a projection profile method before optimizing the cost function. Then, top and bottom lines are estimated using a least squares line fitting with RANSAC. Overall algorithm is designed to perform character segmentation, line fitting, and rectification iteratively. Since the cost function is non-convex and many variables are involved in the function, the proposed method also develops an optimization method using Augmented Lagrange Multiplier method. This dissertation evaluates the proposed method on real and synthetic text images and experimental results show that the proposed method achieves higher OCR accuracy than the conventional approach and also yields visually pleasing results. Finally, the proposed method can be extended to the curved surface dewarping in real scene. In real scene, there are many circular objects such as medicine bottles or cans of drinking water, and their curved surfaces can be modeled as Generalized Cylindrical Surfaces (GCS). These curved surfaces include many significant text and figures, however their text has irregular structure compared to documents. Therefore, the conventional dewarping methods based on the properties of well-rectified text have problems in their rectification. Based on the observation that many curved surfaces include well-aligned line segments (boundary lines of objects or barcode), the proposed method rectifies the curved surfaces by exploiting the proposed line segment terms. Experimental results on a range of images with curved surfaces of circular objects show that the proposed method performs rectification robustly.1 Introduction 1 1.1 Document image dewarping 3 1.2 Scene text rectification 5 1.3 Curved surface dewarping in real scene 7 1.4 Contents 8 2 Related work 9 2.1 Document image dewarping 9 2.1.1 Dewarping methods using additional information 9 2.1.2 Text-line based dewarping methods 10 2.2 Scene text rectification 11 2.3 Curved surface dewarping in real scene 12 3 Document image dewarping 15 3.1 Proposed cost function 15 3.1.1 Parametric model of dewarping process 15 3.1.2 Cost function design 18 3.1.3 Line segment properties and cost function 19 3.2 Outlier removal and optimization 26 3.2.1 Jacobian matrix of the proposed cost function 27 3.3 Document region detection and dewarping 31 3.4 Experimental results 32 3.4.1 Experimental results on text-abundant document images 33 3.4.2 Experimental results on non conventional document images 34 3.5 Summary 47 4 Scene text rectification 49 4.1 Proposed cost function for rectification 49 4.1.1 Cost function design 49 4.1.2 Character alignment properties and alignment terms 51 4.2 Overall algorithm 54 4.2.1 Initialization 55 4.2.2 Character segmentation 56 4.2.3 Estimation of the alignment parameters 57 4.2.4 Cost function optimization for rectification 58 4.3 Experimental results 63 4.4 Summary 66 5 Curved surface dewarping in real scene 73 5.1 Proposed curved surface dewarping method 73 5.1.1 Pre-processing 73 5.1 Experimental results 74 5.2 Summary 76 6 Conclusions 83 Bibliography 85 Abstract (Korean) 93Docto

Extraction of textual information from image for information retrieval

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

A Work and its Shapers: The "Most High Scripture of the Rectifying Methods of the Three Heavens" in Early Medieval China

abstract: Religions, following Max Müller, have often been seen by scholars in religious studies as uniform collections of beliefs and practices encoded in stable “sacred books” that direct the conduct of religious actors. These texts were the chief focus of academic students of religion through much of the 20th century, and this approach remains strong in the 21st. However, a growing chorus of dissidents has begun to focus on the lived experience of practitioners and the material objects that structure that experience, and some textual scholars have begun extending this materialist framework to the study of texts. This dissertation is a contribution in that vein from the field of Daoist studies. Now split between two separate texts, the Most High Scripture of the Rectifying Methods of the Three Heavens began as a 4th-century collection of apocalyptic predictions and apotropaic devices designed to deliver a select group of Chinese literati to the heavens of Highest Clarity. Later editors during the early medieval period (ca. 220-589 CE) took one of two paths: for their own reasons, they altered the Rectifying Methods to emphasize either the world’s end or its continuation. Detailed study of these alterations and their contexts shows how individuals and groups used and modified the Rectifying Methods in in ways that challenge the conventional relationship between religious text and religious actor.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Religious Studies 201

Geometric correction of historical Arabic documents

Geometric deformations in historical documents significantly influence the success of both Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques and human readability. They may have been introduced at any time during the life cycle of a document, from when it was first printed to the time it was digitised by an imaging device. This Thesis focuses on the challenging domain of geometric correction of Arabic historical documents, where background research has highlighted that existing approaches for geometric correction of Latin-script historical documents are not sensitive to the characteristics of text in Arabic documents and therefore cannot be applied successfully. Text line segmentation and baseline detection algorithms have been investigated to propose a new more suitable one for warped Arabic historical document images. Advanced ideas for performing dewarping and geometric restoration on historical Arabic documents, as dictated by the specific characteristics of the problem have been implemented.In addition to developing an algorithm to detect accurate baselines of historical printed Arabic documents the research also contributes a new dataset consisting of historical Arabic documents with different degrees of warping severity.Overall, a new dewarping system, the first for Historical Arabic documents, has been developed taking into account both global and local features of the text image and the patterns of the smooth distortion between text lines. By using the results of the proposed line segmentation and baseline detection methods, it can cope with a variety of distortions, such as page curl, arbitrary warping and fold

Examining Second Language Reading: A Critical Review of the Singapore Cambridge General Certificate of Education Ordinary-Level Chinese Language Examination

This mixed methods study critically reviews how the Singapore-Cambridge General Certificate of Education Ordinary-Level Chinese Language Examination (GCE 1162) examines second language reading. The main research question asks, ‘To what degree have the intended measurement objectives of the GCE 1162 reading examination been achieved?’ Four sub research questions address issues of specifications and administration, test-taker characteristics, cognitive parameters and contextual parameters. Resources drawn on include Singapore Ministry of Education and Singapore Examinations and Assessment Board documents, specifically, examination information booklets, syllabuses, committee reports and annual reviews. Subject matter experts were appointed to analyse the reading comprehension passages and test items from 22 sets of GCE 1162 reading examination papers from 2006 to 2016. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 22 stakeholders involved in coordination, test design, item construction, marking and reviewing. The interviewees included members of an elite policy group with privileged access to test specifications and procedures. Further interviews were carried out with secondary school Chinese language teachers and students, whose perspectives are seldom considered in validation processes. Opinions were also sought from experts in the field of Chinese as a second language, reading and assessment. The study begins with an account of the concepts of validity and reading constructs. Chapter 2 discusses the Singapore education and examination system, foregrounding the history of Chinese language education and the bilingual policy introduced in 1966. A methodology chapter follows. Chapters 4 to 8 address separately each of the four sub research questions in which claims, assumptions, supporting evidence and rebuttals are presented. The final chapter, Chapter 9, addresses a posteriori inferences, including scoring, criterion-related components, and washback and impact. A cautious conclusion is drawn, namely that the measurement quality of the GCE 1162 reading examination is at a moderately unsatisfactory level

A word image coding technique and its applications in information retrieval from imaged documents

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC