Character Segmentation in Asian Collector's Seal Imprints: An Attempt to Retrieval Based on Ancient Character Typeface

Collector's seals provide important clues about the ownership of a book. They contain much information pertaining to the essential elements of ancient materials and also show the details of possession, its relation to the book, the identity of the collectors and their social status and wealth, amongst others. Asian collectors have typically used artistic ancient characters rather than modern ones to make their seals. In addition to the owner's name, several other words are used to express more profound meanings. A system that automatically recognizes these characters can help enthusiasts and professionals better understand the background information of these seals. However, there is a lack of training data and labelled images, as samples of some seals are scarce and most of them are degraded images. It is necessary to find new ways to make full use of such scarce data. While these data are available online, they do not contain information on the characters'position. The goal of this research is to provide retrieval tools assist in obtaining more information from Asian collector's seals imprints without consuming a lot of computational resources. In this paper, a character segmentation method is proposed to predict the candidate characters'area without any labelled training data that contain character coordinate information. A retrieval-based recognition system that focuses on a single character is also proposed to support seal retrieval and matching. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed character segmentation method performs well on Asian collector's seals, with 92% of the test data being correctly segmented

MCCFNet: multi-channel color fusion network for cognitive classification of traditional Chinese paintings.

The computational modeling and analysis of traditional Chinese painting rely heavily on cognitive classification based on visual perception. This approach is crucial for understanding and identifying artworks created by different artists. However, the effective integration of visual perception into artificial intelligence (AI) models remains largely unexplored. Additionally, the classification research of Chinese painting faces certain challenges, such as insufficient investigation into the specific characteristics of painting images for author classification and recognition. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework called multi-channel color fusion network (MCCFNet), which aims to extract visual features from diverse color perspectives. By considering multiple color channels, MCCFNet enhances the ability of AI models to capture intricate details and nuances present in Chinese painting. To improve the performance of the DenseNet model, we introduce a regional weighted pooling (RWP) strategy specifically designed for the DenseNet169 architecture. This strategy enhances the extraction of highly discriminative features. In our experimental evaluation, we comprehensively compared the performance of our proposed MCCFNet model against six state-of-the-art models. The comparison was conducted on a dataset consisting of 2436 TCP samples, derived from the works of 10 renowned Chinese artists. The evaluation metrics employed for performance assessment were Top-1 Accuracy and the area under the curve (AUC). The experimental results have shown that our proposed MCCFNet model significantly outperform all other benchmarking methods with the highest classification accuracy of 98.68%. Meanwhile, the classification accuracy of any deep learning models on TCP can be much improved when adopting our proposed framework

Character Recognition in Byzantine Seals with Deep Neural Networks

Seals are small coin-shaped artifacts, mostly made of lead, held with strings to seal letters. This work presents the first attempt towards automatic reading of text on Byzantine seal images.Byzantine seals are generally decorated with iconography on the obverse side and Greek text on the reverse side. Text may include the sender's name, position in the Byzantine aristocracy, and elements of prayers. Both text and iconography are precious literary sources that wait to be exploited electronically, so the development of computerized systems for interpreting seals images is of paramount importance. This work's contribution is hence a deep, two-stages, character reading pipeline for transcribing Byzantine seal images. A first deep convolutional neural network (CNN) detects characters in the seal (character localization). A second convolutional network reads the localized characters (character classification). Finally, a diplomatic transcription of the seal is provided by post-processing the two network outputs. We provide an experimental evaluation of each CNN in isolation and both CNNs in combination. All performances are evaluated by cross-validation. Character localization achieves a mean average precision ([email protected]) greater than 0.9. Classification of characters cropped from ground truth bounding boxes achieves Top-1 accuracy greater than 0.92. End-to-end evaluation shows the efficiency of the proposed approach when compared to the SoTA for similar tasks

A Survey of Geometric Analysis in Cultural Heritage

We present a review of recent techniques for performing geometric analysis in cultural heritage (CH) applications. The survey is aimed at researchers in the areas of computer graphics, computer vision and CH computing, as well as to scholars and practitioners in the CH field. The problems considered include shape perception enhancement, restoration and preservation support, monitoring over time, object interpretation and collection analysis. All of these problems typically rely on an understanding of the structure of the shapes in question at both a local and global level. In this survey, we discuss the different problem forms and review the main solution methods, aided by classification criteria based on the geometric scale at which the analysis is performed and the cardinality of the relationships among object parts exploited during the analysis. We finalize the report by discussing open problems and future perspectives

Verification of Authenticity of Stamps in Documents

Klasická inkoustová razítka, která se používají k autorizaci dokumentů, se dnes díky rozšíření moderních technologií dají relativně snadno padělat metodou oskenování a vytištění. V rámci diplomové práce je vyvíjen automatický nástroj pro ověření pravosti razítek, který najde využití zejména v prostředích, kde je nutné zpracovávat velké množství dokumentů. Procesu ověření pravosti razítka musí přirozeně předcházet jeho detekce v dokumentu - úloha zpracování obrazu, která zatím nemá přesvědčivé řešení. V této diplomové práci je navržena zcela nová metoda detekce a ověření pravosti razítka v barevných obrazech dokumentů. Tato metoda zahrnuje plnou segmentaci stránky za účelem určení kandidátních řešení, dále extrakci příznaků a následnou klasifikaci kandidátů za pomoci algoritmu podpůrných vektorů (SVM). Evaluace ukázala, že algoritmus umožňuje rozlišovat razítka od jiných barevných objektů v dokumentu jako jsou například loga a barevné nápisy. Kromě toho algoritmus dokáže rozlišit pravá razítka od kopií.Classical ink stamps and seals used for authentication of a document content have become relatively easy to forge by the scan & print technique since the technology is available to general public. For environments where a huge volume of documents is processed, an automatic system for verification of authenticity of stamps is being developed in the scope of this master's thesis. The process of stamp authenticity verification naturally must be preceded by the phase of stamp detection and segmentation - a difficult task of Document Image Analysis (DIA). In this master's thesis, a novel method for detection and verification of stamps in color document images is proposed. It involves a full segmentation of the page to identify candidate solutions, extraction of features, and further classification of the candidates by means of support vector machines. The evaluation has shown that the algorithm is capable of differentiating stamps from other color objects in the document such as logos or text and also genuine stamps from copied ones.

Adaptive Algorithms for Automated Processing of Document Images

Large scale document digitization projects continue to motivate interesting document understanding technologies such as script and language identification, page classification, segmentation and enhancement. Typically, however, solutions are still limited to narrow domains or regular formats such as books, forms, articles or letters and operate best on clean documents scanned in a controlled environment. More general collections of heterogeneous documents challenge the basic assumptions of state-of-the-art technology regarding quality, script, content and layout. Our work explores the use of adaptive algorithms for the automated analysis of noisy and complex document collections. We first propose, implement and evaluate an adaptive clutter detection and removal technique for complex binary documents. Our distance transform based technique aims to remove irregular and independent unwanted foreground content while leaving text content untouched. The novelty of this approach is in its determination of best approximation to clutter-content boundary with text like structures. Second, we describe a page segmentation technique called Voronoi++ for complex layouts which builds upon the state-of-the-art method proposed by Kise [Kise1999]. Our approach does not assume structured text zones and is designed to handle multi-lingual text in both handwritten and printed form. Voronoi++ is a dynamically adaptive and contextually aware approach that considers components' separation features combined with Docstrum [O'Gorman1993] based angular and neighborhood features to form provisional zone hypotheses. These provisional zones are then verified based on the context built from local separation and high-level content features. Finally, our research proposes a generic model to segment and to recognize characters for any complex syllabic or non-syllabic script, using font-models. This concept is based on the fact that font files contain all the information necessary to render text and thus a model for how to decompose them. Instead of script-specific routines, this work is a step towards a generic character and recognition scheme for both Latin and non-Latin scripts

A Feature Extraction Method Based on Feature Fusion and its Application in the Text-Driven Failure Diagnosis Field

As a basic task in NLP (Natural Language Processing), feature extraction directly determines the quality of text clustering and text classification. However, the commonly used TF-IDF (Term Frequency & Inverse Document Frequency) and LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) text feature extraction methods have shortcomings in not considering the text’s context and blindness to the topic of the corpus. This study builds a feature extraction algorithm and application scenarios in the field of failure diagnosis. A text-driven failure diagnosis model is designed to classify and automatically judge which failure mode the failure described in the text belongs to once a failure-description text is entered. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed feature extraction algorithm and failure diagnosis model, a long-term accumulated failure description text of an aircraft maintenance and support system was used as a subject to conduct an empirical study. The final experimental results also show that the proposed feature extraction method can effectively improve the effect of clustering, and the proposed failure diagnosis model achieves high accuracies and low false alarm rates

Cognitive Case Studies of Chinese in Discourse Analysis and Classroom Teaching

In the first case study, a piece of recent BBC news reported on Chinese netizens leaving random but funny comments on a Western website attracted people’s attention. A closer look at those comments reveals that understanding the Chinese netizens’ comments requires metaphorical and cultural knowledge. This study starts with theoretical explanations on metaphor from different perspectives and then presents cultural variations in Western and Eastern metaphors. With theories and cultures grounded, a detailed analysis was done to show people without Chinese cultural background how to understand the Chinese Internet metaphors that drew people’s attention. The second case study takes a critical discourse analysis approach to investigate metaphors in political discourses in Chinese. Five pieces of Chinese government reports were studied. Metaphor, revealing how we think about the world, encompasses cultural and social factors. It functions differently for different communication purpose. The current study proves the persuasive role of metaphor in political discourse which can evoke people’s emotional response, for the governing group to have an ideological influence on how people conceptualize things. The third case study applies word recognition as part of the classroom instruction in the form of meaning, character and pronunciation, to investigate whether training on either two of the three constituents can improve students’ vocabulary acquisition. The results showed that, for new learners, the bond between characters and either pronunciation or meaning is weak. Training in either character with meaning or character with pronunciation has positive effects and training to enhance the relation between character and pronunciation also retrieve meaning, which brings a three-way benefit