441 research outputs found
Novel geometric features for off-line writer identification
Writer identification is an important field in forensic document examination. Typically, a writer identification system consists of two main steps: feature extraction and matching and the performance depends significantly on the feature extraction step. In this paper, we propose a set of novel geometrical features that are able to characterize different writers. These features include direction, curvature, and tortuosity. We also propose an improvement of the edge-based directional and chain code-based features. The proposed methods are applicable to Arabic and English handwriting. We have also studied several methods for computing the distance between feature vectors when comparing two writers. Evaluation of the methods is performed using both the IAM handwriting database and the QUWI database for each individual feature reaching Top1 identification rates of 82 and 87 % in those two datasets, respectively. The accuracies achieved by Kernel Discriminant Analysis (KDA) are significantly higher than those observed before feature-level writer identification was implemented. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the improved versions of both chain-code features and edge-based directional features
Handwriting styles: benchmarks and evaluation metrics
Evaluating the style of handwriting generation is a challenging problem,
since it is not well defined. It is a key component in order to develop in
developing systems with more personalized experiences with humans. In this
paper, we propose baseline benchmarks, in order to set anchors to estimate the
relative quality of different handwriting style methods. This will be done
using deep learning techniques, which have shown remarkable results in
different machine learning tasks, learning classification, regression, and most
relevant to our work, generating temporal sequences. We discuss the challenges
associated with evaluating our methods, which is related to evaluation of
generative models in general. We then propose evaluation metrics, which we find
relevant to this problem, and we discuss how we evaluate the evaluation
metrics. In this study, we use IRON-OFF dataset. To the best of our knowledge,
there is no work done before in generating handwriting (either in terms of
methodology or the performance metrics), our in exploring styles using this
dataset.Comment: Submitted to IEEE International Workshop on Deep and Transfer
Learning (DTL 2018
A fine-grained approach to scene text script identification
This paper focuses on the problem of script identification in unconstrained
scenarios. Script identification is an important prerequisite to recognition,
and an indispensable condition for automatic text understanding systems
designed for multi-language environments. Although widely studied for document
images and handwritten documents, it remains an almost unexplored territory for
scene text images.
We detail a novel method for script identification in natural images that
combines convolutional features and the Naive-Bayes Nearest Neighbor
classifier. The proposed framework efficiently exploits the discriminative
power of small stroke-parts, in a fine-grained classification framework.
In addition, we propose a new public benchmark dataset for the evaluation of
joint text detection and script identification in natural scenes. Experiments
done in this new dataset demonstrate that the proposed method yields state of
the art results, while it generalizes well to different datasets and variable
number of scripts. The evidence provided shows that multi-lingual scene text
recognition in the wild is a viable proposition. Source code of the proposed
method is made available online
Novel geometric features for off-line writer identification
Writer identification is an important field in forensic document examination. Typically, a writer identification system consists of two main steps: feature extraction and matching and the performance depends significantly on the feature extraction step. In this paper, we propose a set of novel geometrical features that are able to characterize different writers. These features include direction, curvature, and tortuosity. We also propose an improvement of the edge-based directional and chain code-based features. The proposed methods are applicable to Arabic and English handwriting. We have also studied several methods for computing the distance between feature vectors when comparing two writers. Evaluation of the methods is performed using both the IAM handwriting database and the QUWI database for each individual feature reaching Top1 identification rates of 82 and 87 % in those two datasets, respectively. The accuracies achieved by Kernel Discriminant Analysis (KDA) are significantly higher than those observed before feature-level writer identification was implemented. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the improved versions of both chain-code features and edge-based directional features.Qatar National Research Fund through the National Priority Research Program (NPRP) No. 09-864-1-128Scopu
Automatic handwriter identification using advanced machine learning
Handwriter identification a challenging problem especially for forensic investigation. This topic has received significant attention from the research community and several handwriter identification systems were developed for various applications including forensic science, document analysis and investigation of the historical documents. This work is part of an investigation to develop new tools and methods for Arabic palaeography, which is is the study of handwritten material, particularly ancient manuscripts with missing writers, dates, and/or places. In particular, the main aim of this research project is to investigate and develop new techniques and algorithms for the classification and analysis of ancient handwritten documents to support palaeographic studies.
Three contributions were proposed in this research. The first is concerned with the development of a text line extraction algorithm on colour and greyscale historical manuscripts. The idea uses a modified bilateral filtering approach to adaptively smooth the images while still preserving the edges through a nonlinear combination of neighboring image values. The proposed algorithm aims to compute a median and a separating seam and has been validated to deal with both greyscale and colour historical documents using different datasets. The results obtained suggest that our proposed technique yields attractive results when compared against a few similar algorithms.
The second contribution proposes to deploy a combination of Oriented Basic Image features and the concept of graphemes codebook in order to improve the recognition performances. The proposed algorithm is capable to effectively extract the most distinguishing handwriter’s patterns. The idea consists of judiciously combining a multiscale feature extraction with the concept of grapheme to allow for the extraction of several discriminating features such as handwriting curvature, direction, wrinkliness and various edge-based features. The technique was validated for identifying handwriters using both Arabic and English writings captured as scanned images using the IAM dataset for English handwriting and ICFHR 2012 dataset for Arabic handwriting. The results obtained clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method when compared against some similar techniques.
The third contribution is concerned with an offline handwriter identification approach based on the convolutional neural network technology. At the first stage, the Alex-Net architecture was employed to learn image features (handwritten scripts) and the features obtained from the fully connected layers of the model. Then, a Support vector machine classifier is deployed to classify the writing styles of the various handwriters. In this way, the test scripts can be classified by the CNN training model for further classification. The proposed approach was evaluated based on Arabic Historical datasets; Islamic Heritage Project (IHP) and Qatar National Library (QNL). The obtained results demonstrated that the proposed model achieved superior performances when compared to some similar method
Writer identification approach based on bag of words with OBI features
Handwriter identification aims to simplify the task of forensic experts by providing them with semi-automated tools in order to enable them to narrow down the search to determine the final identification of an unknown handwritten sample. An identification algorithm aims to produce a list of predicted writers of the unknown handwritten sample ranked in terms of confidence measure metrics for use by the forensic expert will make the final decision.
Most existing handwriter identification systems use either statistical or model-based approaches. To further improve the performances this paper proposes to deploy a combination of both approaches using Oriented Basic Image features and the concept of graphemes codebook. To reduce the resulting high dimensionality of the feature vector a Kernel Principal Component Analysis has been used. To gauge the effectiveness of the proposed method a performance analysis, using IAM dataset for English handwriting and ICFHR 2012 dataset for Arabic handwriting, has been carried out. The results obtained achieved an accuracy of 96% thus demonstrating its superiority when compared against similar techniques
Handwritten Word Spotting with Corrected Attributes
International audienceWe propose an approach to multi-writer word spotting, where the goal is to find a query word in a dataset comprised of document images. We propose an attributes-based approach that leads to a low-dimensional, fixed-length representation of the word images that is fast to compute and, especially, fast to compare. This approach naturally leads to an unified representation of word images and strings, which seamlessly allows one to indistinctly perform query-by-example, where the query is an image, and query-by-string, where the query is a string. We also propose a calibration scheme to correct the attributes scores based on Canonical Correlation Analysis that greatly improves the results on a challenging dataset. We test our approach on two public datasets showing state-of-the-art results
BioTouchPass: Handwritten Passwords for Touchscreen Biometrics
This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibleThis work enhances traditional authentication systems based on Personal Identification Numbers (PIN) and One-
Time Passwords (OTP) through the incorporation of biometric information as a second level of user authentication. In our
proposed approach, users draw each digit of the password on the touchscreen of the device instead of typing them as usual. A
complete analysis of our proposed biometric system is carried out regarding the discriminative power of each handwritten digit and
the robustness when increasing the length of the password and the number of enrolment samples. The new e-BioDigit database,
which comprises on-line handwritten digits from 0 to 9, has been acquired using the finger as input on a mobile device. This
database is used in the experiments reported in this work and it is available together with benchmark results in GitHub1. Finally,
we discuss specific details for the deployment of our proposed approach on current PIN and OTP systems, achieving results with
Equal Error Rates (EERs) ca. 4.0% when the attacker knows the password. These results encourage the deployment of our
proposed approach in comparison to traditional PIN and OTP systems where the attack would have 100% success rate under
the same impostor scenarioThis work has been supported by projects: BIBECA (MINECO), Bio-Guard (Ayudas Fundación BBVA a Equipos de Investigación CientÃfica 2017) and by UAM-CecaBank.
Ruben Tolosana is supported by a FPU Fellowship from Spanish MEC
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