Implementation of a Human-Computer Interface for Computer Assisted Translation and Handwritten Text Recognition

A human-computer interface is developed to provide services of computer assisted machine translation (CAT) and computer assisted transcription of handwritten text images (CATTI). The back-end machine translation (MT) and handwritten text recognition (HTR) systems are provided by the Pattern Recognition and Human Language Technology (PRHLT) research group. The idea is to provide users with easy to use tools to convert interactive translation and transcription feasible tasks. The assisted service is provided by remote servers with CAT or CATTI capabilities. The interface supplies the user with tools for efficient local edition: deletion, insertion and substitution.Ocampo Sepúlveda, JC. (2009). Implementation of a Human-Computer Interface for Computer Assisted Translation and Handwritten Text Recognition. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/14318Archivo delegad

A Web-Based Demo to Interactive Multimodal Transcription of Historic Text images

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04346-8_58[EN] Paleography experts spend many hours transcribing historic documents, and state-of-the-art handwritten text recognition systems are not suitable for performing this task automatically. In this paper we present the modifications oil a previously developed interactive framework for transcription of handwritten text. This system, rather than full automation, aimed at assisting the user with the recognition-transcription process.This work has been supported by the EC (FEDER), the Spanish MEC under grant TIN2006-15694-C02-01 and the research programme Consolider Ingenio 2010 MIPRCV (CSD2007-00018) and by the UPV (FPI fellowship 2006-04).Romero Gómez, V.; Leiva Torres, LA.; Alabau Gonzalvo, V.; Toselli, AH.; Vidal Ruiz, E. (2009). A Web-Based Demo to Interactive Multimodal Transcription of Historic Text images. En Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries: 13th European Conference, ECDL 2009, Corfu, Greece, September 27 - October 2, 2009. Proceedings. Springer Verlag (Germany). 459-460. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04346-8_58S459460Toselli, A.H., et al.: Computer assisted transcription of handwritten text. In: Proc. of ICDAR 2007, pp. 944–948. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2007)Romero, V., Toselli, A.H., Rodríguez, L., Vidal, E.: Computer assisted transcription for ancient text images. In: Kamel, M.S., Campilho, A. (eds.) ICIAR 2007. LNCS, vol. 4633, pp. 1182–1193. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)Toselli, A.H., et al.: Computer assisted transcription of text images and multimodal interaction. In: Popescu-Belis, A., Stiefelhagen, R. (eds.) MLMI 2008. LNCS, vol. 5237, pp. 296–308. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Romero, V.: et al.: Interactive multimodal transcription of text images using a web-based demo system. In: Proc. of the IUI, Florida, pp. 477–478 (2009)Romero, V., et al.: Improvements in the computer assisted transciption system of handwritten text images. In: Proc. of the PRIS 2008, pp. 103–112 (2008

Image speech combination for interactive computer assisted transcription of handwritten documents

[EN] Handwritten document transcription aims to obtain the contents of a document to provide efficient information access to, among other, digitised historical documents. The increasing number of historical documents published by libraries and archives makes this an important task. In this context, the use of image processing and understanding techniques in conjunction with assistive technologies reduces the time and human effort required for obtaining the final perfect transcription. The assistive transcription system proposes a hypothesis, usually derived from a recognition process of the handwritten text image. Then, the professional transcriber feedback can be used to obtain an improved hypothesis and speed-up the final transcription. In this framework, a speech signal corresponding to the dictation of the handwritten text can be used as an additional source of information. This multimodal approach, that combines the image of the handwritten text with the speech of the dictation of its contents, could make better the hypotheses (initial and improved) offered to the transcriber. In this paper we study the feasibility of a multimodal interactive transcription system for an assistive paradigm known as Computer Assisted Transcription of Text Images. Different techniques are tested for obtaining the multimodal combination in this framework. The use of the proposed multimodal approach reveals a significant reduction of transcription effort with some multimodal combination techniques, allowing for a faster transcription process.Work partially supported by projects READ-674943 (European Union's H2020), SmartWays-RTC-2014-1466-4 (MINECO, Spain), and CoMUN-HaT-TIN2015-70924-C2-1-R (MINECO/FEDER), and by Generalitat Valenciana (GVA), Spain under reference PROMETEOII/2014/030.Granell, E.; Romero, V.; Martínez-Hinarejos, C. (2019). Image speech combination for interactive computer assisted transcription of handwritten documents. Computer Vision and Image Understanding. 180:74-83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cviu.2019.01.009S748318

Escritoire: A Multi-touch Desk with e-Pen Input for Capture, Management and Multimodal Interactive Transcription of Handwritten Documents

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19390-8_53A large quantity of documents used every day are still handwritten. However, it is interesting to transform each of these documents into its digital version for managing, archiving and sharing. Here we present Escritoire, a multi-touch desk that allows the user to capture, transcribe and work with handwritten documents. The desktop is continuously monitored using two cameras. Whenever the user makes a specific hand gesture over a paper, Escritoire proceeds to take an image. Then, the capture is automatically preprocesses, obtaining as a result an improved representation. Finally, the text image is transcribed using automatic techniques and finally the transcription is displayed on Escritoire.This work was partially supported by the Spanish MEC under FPU scholarship (AP2010-0575), STraDA research project (TIN2012-37475-C02-01) and MITTRAL research project (TIN2009-14633-C03-01); the EU’s 7th Framework Programme under tranScriptorium grant agreement (FP7/2007-2013/600707).Martín-Albo Simón, D.; Romero Gómez, V.; Vidal Ruiz, E. (2015). Escritoire: A Multi-touch Desk with e-Pen Input for Capture, Management and Multimodal Interactive Transcription of Handwritten Documents. En Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis. Springer. 471-478. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19390-8_53S471478Andrew, A.: Another efficient algorithm for convex hulls in two dimensions. Inf. Process. Lett. 9(5), 216–219 (1979)Bosch, V., Toselli, A.H., Vidal, E.: Statistical text line analysis in handwritten documents. In: Proceedings of ICFHR (2012)Eisenstein, J., Puerta, A.: Adaptation in automated user-interface design. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (2000)Jelinek, F.: Statistical Methods for Speech Recognition. MIT Press, Cambridge (1998)Kalman, R.E.: A new approach to linear filtering and prediction problems. Trans. ASME-J. Basic Eng. 82(Series D), 35–45 (1960)Keysers, D., Shafait, F., Breuel, T.M.: Document image zone classification - a simple high-performance approach. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Computer Vision Theory (2007)Kozielski, M., Forster, J., Ney, H.: Moment-based image normalization for handwritten text recognition. In: Proceedings of ICFHR (2012)Lampert, C.H., Braun, T., Ulges, A., Keysers, D., Breuel, T.M.: Oblivious document capture and real-time retrieval. In: International Workshop on Camera Based Document Analysis and Recognition (2005)Liang, J., Doermann, D., Li, H.: Camera based analysis of text and documents a survey. Int. J. Doc. Anal. Recogn. 7(2–3), 84–104 (2005)Liwicki, M., Rostanin, O., El-Neklawy, S.M., Dengel, A.: Touch & write: a multi-touch table with pen-input. In: Proceedings of International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (2010)Marti, U.V., Bunke, H.: Text line segmentation and word recognition in a system for general writer independent handwriting recognition. In: Proceedings of ICDAR (2001)Martín-Albo, D., Romero, V., Toselli, A.H., Vidal, E.: Multimodal computer-assisted transcription of text images at character-level interaction. Int. J. Pattern Recogn. Artif. Intell. 26(5), 19 (2012)Martín-Albo, D., Romero, V., Vidal, E.: Interactive off-line handwritten text transcription using on-line handwritten text as feedback. In: Proceedings of ICDAR (2013)Mitra, S., Acharya, T.: Gesture recognition: a survey. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. B Cybern. 37(3), 311–324 (2007)Terry, M., Mynatt, E.D.: Recognizing creative needs in user interface design. In: Proceedings of C&C (2002)Toselli, A.H., Juan, A., Keysers, D., González, J., Salvador, I., Ney, H., Vidal, E., Casacuberta, F.: Integrated handwriting recognition and interpretation using finite-state models. Int. J. Pattern Recognit. Artif. Intell. 18(4), 519–539 (2004)Toselli, A.H., Romero, V., Pastor, M., Vidal, E.: Multimodal interactive transcription of text images. Pattern Recognit. 43(5), 1814–1825 (2010)Toselli, A.H., Romero, V., Vidal, E.: Computer assisted transcription of text images and multimodal interaction. In: Popescu-Belis, A., Stiefelhagen, R. (eds.) MLMI 2008. LNCS, vol. 5237, pp. 296–308. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Wachs, J.P., Kolsch, M., Stern, H., Edan, Y.: Vision-based hand-gesture applications. Commun. ACM. 54(2), 60–71 (2011)Wobbrock, J.O., Morris, M.R., Wilson, A.D.: User-defined gestures for surface computing. In: Proceedings of CHI (2009

Transcribing a 17th-century botanical manuscript: Longitudinal evaluation of document layout detection and interactive transcription

[EN] We present a process for cost-effective transcription of cursive handwritten text images that has been tested on a 1,000-page 17th-century book about botanical species. The process comprised two main tasks, namely: (1) preprocessing: page layout analysis, text line detection, and extraction; and (2) transcription of the extracted text line images. Both tasks were carried out with semiautomatic pro- cedures, aimed at incrementally minimizing user correction effort, by means of computer-assisted line detection and interactive handwritten text recognition technologies. The contribution derived from this work is three-fold. First, we provide a detailed human-supervised transcription of a relatively large historical handwritten book, ready to be searchable, indexable, and accessible to cultural heritage scholars as well as the general public. Second, we have conducted the first longitudinal study to date on interactive handwriting text recognition, for which we provide a very comprehensive user assessment of the real-world per- formance of the technologies involved in this work. Third, as a result of this process, we have produced a detailed transcription and document layout infor- mation (i.e. high-quality labeled data) ready to be used by researchers working on automated technologies for document analysis and recognition.This work is supported by the European Commission through the EU projects HIMANIS (JPICH program, Spanish, grant Ref. PCIN-2015-068) and READ (Horizon-2020 program, grant Ref. 674943); and the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (grant number SP20130189). This work was also part of the Valorization and I+D+i Resources program of VLC/CAMPUS and has been funded by the Spanish MECD as part of the International Excellence Campus program.Toselli, AH.; Leiva, LA.; Bordes-Cabrera, I.; Hernández-Tornero, C.; Bosch Campos, V.; Vidal, E. (2018). Transcribing a 17th-century botanical manuscript: Longitudinal evaluation of document layout detection and interactive transcription. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. 33(1):173-202. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqw064S173202331Bazzi, I., Schwartz, R., & Makhoul, J. (1999). An omnifont open-vocabulary OCR system for English and Arabic. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 21(6), 495-504. doi:10.1109/34.771314Causer, T., Tonra, J., & Wallace, V. (2012). Transcription maximized; expense minimized? Crowdsourcing and editing The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham*. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 27(2), 119-137. doi:10.1093/llc/fqs004Ramel, J. Y., Leriche, S., Demonet, M. L., & Busson, S. (2007). User-driven page layout analysis of historical printed books. International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR), 9(2-4), 243-261. doi:10.1007/s10032-007-0040-6Romero, V., Fornés, A., Serrano, N., Sánchez, J. A., Toselli, A. H., Frinken, V., … Lladós, J. (2013). The ESPOSALLES database: An ancient marriage license corpus for off-line handwriting recognition. Pattern Recognition, 46(6), 1658-1669. doi:10.1016/j.patcog.2012.11.024Romero, V., Toselli, A. H., & Vidal, E. (2012). Multimodal Interactive Handwritten Text Transcription. Series in Machine Perception and Artificial Intelligence. doi:10.1142/8394Toselli, A. H., Romero, V., Pastor, M., & Vidal, E. (2010). Multimodal interactive transcription of text images. Pattern Recognition, 43(5), 1814-1825. doi:10.1016/j.patcog.2009.11.019Toselli, A. H., Vidal, E., Romero, V., & Frinken, V. (2016). HMM word graph based keyword spotting in handwritten document images. Information Sciences, 370-371, 497-518. doi:10.1016/j.ins.2016.07.063Bunke, H., Bengio, S., & Vinciarelli, A. (2004). Offline recognition of unconstrained handwritten texts using HMMs and statistical language models. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 26(6), 709-720. doi:10.1109/tpami.2004.1

Multimodal Interactive Transcription of Handwritten Text Images

En esta tesis se presenta un nuevo marco interactivo y multimodal para la transcripción de Documentos manuscritos. Esta aproximación, lejos de proporcionar la transcripción completa pretende asistir al experto en la dura tarea de transcribir. Hasta la fecha, los sistemas de reconocimiento de texto manuscrito disponibles no proporcionan transcripciones aceptables por los usuarios y, generalmente, se requiere la intervención del humano para corregir las transcripciones obtenidas. Estos sistemas han demostrado ser realmente útiles en aplicaciones restringidas y con vocabularios limitados (como es el caso del reconocimiento de direcciones postales o de cantidades numéricas en cheques bancarios), consiguiendo en este tipo de tareas resultados aceptables. Sin embargo, cuando se trabaja con documentos manuscritos sin ningún tipo de restricción (como documentos manuscritos antiguos o texto espontáneo), la tecnología actual solo consigue resultados inaceptables. El escenario interactivo estudiado en esta tesis permite una solución más efectiva. En este escenario, el sistema de reconocimiento y el usuario cooperan para generar la transcripción final de la imagen de texto. El sistema utiliza la imagen de texto y una parte de la transcripción previamente validada (prefijo) para proponer una posible continuación. Despues, el usuario encuentra y corrige el siguente error producido por el sistema, generando así un nuevo prefijo mas largo. Este nuevo prefijo, es utilizado por el sistema para sugerir una nueva hipótesis. La tecnología utilizada se basa en modelos ocultos de Markov y n-gramas. Estos modelos son utilizados aquí de la misma manera que en el reconocimiento automático del habla. Algunas modificaciones en la definición convencional de los n-gramas han sido necesarias para tener en cuenta la retroalimentación del usuario en este sistema.Romero Gómez, V. (2010). Multimodal Interactive Transcription of Handwritten Text Images [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/8541Palanci

Human or Computer Assisted Interactive Transcription: Automated Text Recognition, Text Annotation, and Scholarly Edition in the Twenty-First Century

Computer assisted transcription tools can speed up the initial process of reading and transcribing texts. At the same time, new annotation tools open new ways of accessing the text in its graphical form. The balance and value of each method still needs to be explored. STATE, a complete assisted transcription system for ancient documents, was presented to the audience of the 2013 International Medieval Congress at Leeds. The system offers a multimodal interaction environment to assist humans in transcribing ancient documents: the user can type, write on the screen with a stylus, or utter a word. When one of these actions is used to correct an erroneous word, the system uses this new information to look for other mistakes in the rest of the line. The system is modular, composed of different parts: one part creates projects from a set of images of documents, another part controls an automatic transcription system, and the third part allows the user to interact with the transcriptions and easily correct them as needed. This division of labour allows great flexibility for organising the work in a team of transcribers.Las herramientas de ayuda a la transcripción automática pueden acelerar el proceso inicial de la lectura y transcripción de textos. Al mismo tiempo, las nuevas herramientas de anotación aportan nuevas formas de acceder al texto en su forma original gráfica. Sin embargo, todavía es necesario evaluar las bondades y capacidades de los distintos métodos. STATE, un completo sistema de asistencia a la transcripción de documentos antiguos, se presentó a la audiencia del International Medieval Congress de 2013 celebrado en Leeds. El sistema ofrece un entorno de interacción multimodal para ayudar a las personas en la transcripción de documentos antiguos: el usuario puede teclear, escribir en la pantalla con un lápiz óptico o corregir usando la voz. Cada vez que el usuario cambia de esta forma una palabra, el sistema utiliza la corrección para buscar errores en el resto de la línea. El sistema está dividido en diferentes módulos: uno crea proyectos a partir de un conjunto de imágenes de documentos, otro módulo controla el sistema de transcripción automática, y un tercer módulo permite al usuario interactuar con las transcripciones y corregirlas fácilmente cuando sea necesario. Esta división de las tareas permite una gran flexibilidad para organizar el trabajo de los transcriptores en equipo

Transcrição humana ou assistência interativa computadorizada: reconhecimento automático, anotação e edição erudite no século XXI

Computer assisted transcription tools can speed up the initial process of reading and transcribing texts. At the same time, new annotation tools open new ways of accessing the text in its graphical form. The balance and value of each method still needs to be explored. STATE, a complete assisted transcription system for ancient documents, was presented to the audience of the 2013 International Medieval Congress at Leeds. The system offers a multimodal interaction environment to assist humans in transcribing ancient documents: the user can type, write on the screen with a stylus, or utter a word. When one of these actions is used to correct an erroneous word, the system uses this new information to look for other mistakes in the rest of the line. The system is modular, composed of different parts: one part creates projects from a set of images of documents, another part controls an automatic transcription system, and the third part allows the user to interact with the transcriptions and easily correct them as needed. This division of labour allows great flexibility for organising the work in a team of transcribers.Las herramientas de ayuda a la transcripción automática pueden acelerar el proceso inicial de la lectura y transcripción de textos. Al mismo tiempo, las nuevas herramientas de anotación aportan nuevas formas de acceder al texto en su forma original gráfica. Sin embargo, todavía es necesario evaluar las bondades y capacidades de los distintos métodos. STATE, un completo sistema de asistencia a la transcripción de documentos antiguos, se presentó a la audiencia del International Medieval Congress de 2013 celebrado en Leeds. El sistema ofrece un entorno de interacción multimodal para ayudar a las personas en la transcripción de documentos antiguos: el usuario puede teclear, escribir en la pantalla con un lápiz óptico o corregir usando la voz. Cada vez que el usuario cambia de esta forma una palabra, el sistema utiliza la corrección para buscar errores en el resto de la línea. El sistema está dividido en diferentes módulos: uno crea proyectos a partir de un conjunto de imágenes de documentos, otro módulo controla el sistema de transcripción automática, y un tercer módulo permite al usuario interactuar con las transcripciones y corregirlas fácilmente cuando sea necesario. Esta división de las tareas permite una gran flexibilidad para organizar el trabajo de los transcriptores en equipo.Work supported by the Spanish Government (TIN2010-18958) and the Generalitat Valenciana (Prometeo/2010/028)

Text Line Segmentation of Historical Documents: a Survey

There is a huge amount of historical documents in libraries and in various National Archives that have not been exploited electronically. Although automatic reading of complete pages remains, in most cases, a long-term objective, tasks such as word spotting, text/image alignment, authentication and extraction of specific fields are in use today. For all these tasks, a major step is document segmentation into text lines. Because of the low quality and the complexity of these documents (background noise, artifacts due to aging, interfering lines),automatic text line segmentation remains an open research field. The objective of this paper is to present a survey of existing methods, developed during the last decade, and dedicated to documents of historical interest.Comment: 25 pages, submitted version, To appear in International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, On line version available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/k2813176280456k3

CHARACTER-LEVEL INTERACTIONS IN MULTIMODAL COMPUTER-ASSISTED TRANSCRIPTION OF TEXT IMAGES

HTR systems don't achieve acceptable results in unconstrained applications. Therefore, it is convenient to use a system that allows the user to cooperate in the most confortable way with the system to generate a correct transcription. In this paper, multimodal interaction at character-level is studied.Martín-Albo Simón, D. (2011). CHARACTER-LEVEL INTERACTIONS IN MULTIMODAL COMPUTER-ASSISTED TRANSCRIPTION OF TEXT IMAGES. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/11313Archivo delegad