Word Searching in Scene Image and Video Frame in Multi-Script Scenario using Dynamic Shape Coding

Retrieval of text information from natural scene images and video frames is a challenging task due to its inherent problems like complex character shapes, low resolution, background noise, etc. Available OCR systems often fail to retrieve such information in scene/video frames. Keyword spotting, an alternative way to retrieve information, performs efficient text searching in such scenarios. However, current word spotting techniques in scene/video images are script-specific and they are mainly developed for Latin script. This paper presents a novel word spotting framework using dynamic shape coding for text retrieval in natural scene image and video frames. The framework is designed to search query keyword from multiple scripts with the help of on-the-fly script-wise keyword generation for the corresponding script. We have used a two-stage word spotting approach using Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to detect the translated keyword in a given text line by identifying the script of the line. A novel unsupervised dynamic shape coding based scheme has been used to group similar shape characters to avoid confusion and to improve text alignment. Next, the hypotheses locations are verified to improve retrieval performance. To evaluate the proposed system for searching keyword from natural scene image and video frames, we have considered two popular Indic scripts such as Bangla (Bengali) and Devanagari along with English. Inspired by the zone-wise recognition approach in Indic scripts[1], zone-wise text information has been used to improve the traditional word spotting performance in Indic scripts. For our experiment, a dataset consisting of images of different scenes and video frames of English, Bangla and Devanagari scripts were considered. The results obtained showed the effectiveness of our proposed word spotting approach.Comment: Multimedia Tools and Applications, Springe

Annotation-free Learning of Deep Representations for Word Spotting using Synthetic Data and Self Labeling

Word spotting is a popular tool for supporting the first exploration of historic, handwritten document collections. Today, the best performing methods rely on machine learning techniques, which require a high amount of annotated training material. As training data is usually not available in the application scenario, annotation-free methods aim at solving the retrieval task without representative training samples. In this work, we present an annotation-free method that still employs machine learning techniques and therefore outperforms other learning-free approaches. The weakly supervised training scheme relies on a lexicon, that does not need to precisely fit the dataset. In combination with a confidence based selection of pseudo-labeled training samples, we achieve state-of-the-art query-by-example performances. Furthermore, our method allows to perform query-by-string, which is usually not the case for other annotation-free methods.Comment: Accepted to Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS) 202

Fast ASR-free and almost zero-resource keyword spotting using DTW and CNNs for humanitarian monitoring

We use dynamic time warping (DTW) as supervision for training a convolutional neural network (CNN) based keyword spotting system using a small set of spoken isolated keywords. The aim is to allow rapid deployment of a keyword spotting system in a new language to support urgent United Nations (UN) relief programmes in parts of Africa where languages are extremely under-resourced and the development of annotated speech resources is infeasible. First, we use 1920 recorded keywords (40 keyword types, 34 minutes of speech) as exemplars in a DTW-based template matching system and apply it to untranscribed broadcast speech. Then, we use the resulting DTW scores as targets to train a CNN on the same unlabelled speech. In this way we use just 34 minutes of labelled speech, but leverage a large amount of unlabelled data for training. While the resulting CNN keyword spotter cannot match the performance of the DTW-based system, it substantially outperforms a CNN classifier trained only on the keywords, improving the area under the ROC curve from 0.54 to 0.64. Because our CNN system is several orders of magnitude faster at runtime than the DTW system, it represents the most viable keyword spotter on this extremely limited dataset.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, accepted at Interspeech 201

JavaScript Convolutional Neural Networks for Keyword Spotting in the Browser: An Experimental Analysis

Used for simple commands recognition on devices from smart routers to mobile phones, keyword spotting systems are everywhere. Ubiquitous as well are web applications, which have grown in popularity and complexity over the last decade with significant improvements in usability under cross-platform conditions. However, despite their obvious advantage in natural language interaction, voice-enabled web applications are still far and few between. In this work, we attempt to bridge this gap by bringing keyword spotting capabilities directly into the browser. To our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate a fully-functional implementation of convolutional neural networks in pure JavaScript that runs in any standards-compliant browser. We also apply network slimming, a model compression technique, to explore the accuracy-efficiency tradeoffs, reporting latency measurements on a range of devices and software. Overall, our robust, cross-device implementation for keyword spotting realizes a new paradigm for serving neural network applications, and one of our slim models reduces latency by 66% with a minimal decrease in accuracy of 4% from 94% to 90%.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Sequence Discriminative Training for Deep Learning based Acoustic Keyword Spotting

Speech recognition is a sequence prediction problem. Besides employing various deep learning approaches for framelevel classification, sequence-level discriminative training has been proved to be indispensable to achieve the state-of-the-art performance in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR). However, keyword spotting (KWS), as one of the most common speech recognition tasks, almost only benefits from frame-level deep learning due to the difficulty of getting competing sequence hypotheses. The few studies on sequence discriminative training for KWS are limited for fixed vocabulary or LVCSR based methods and have not been compared to the state-of-the-art deep learning based KWS approaches. In this paper, a sequence discriminative training framework is proposed for both fixed vocabulary and unrestricted acoustic KWS. Sequence discriminative training for both sequence-level generative and discriminative models are systematically investigated. By introducing word-independent phone lattices or non-keyword blank symbols to construct competing hypotheses, feasible and efficient sequence discriminative training approaches are proposed for acoustic KWS. Experiments showed that the proposed approaches obtained consistent and significant improvement in both fixed vocabulary and unrestricted KWS tasks, compared to previous frame-level deep learning based acoustic KWS methods.Comment: accepted by Speech Communication, 08/02/201

DONUT: CTC-based Query-by-Example Keyword Spotting

Keyword spotting--or wakeword detection--is an essential feature for hands-free operation of modern voice-controlled devices. With such devices becoming ubiquitous, users might want to choose a personalized custom wakeword. In this work, we present DONUT, a CTC-based algorithm for online query-by-example keyword spotting that enables custom wakeword detection. The algorithm works by recording a small number of training examples from the user, generating a set of label sequence hypotheses from these training examples, and detecting the wakeword by aggregating the scores of all the hypotheses given a new audio recording. Our method combines the generalization and interpretability of CTC-based keyword spotting with the user-adaptation and convenience of a conventional query-by-example system. DONUT has low computational requirements and is well-suited for both learning and inference on embedded systems without requiring private user data to be uploaded to the cloud.Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2018 Workshop on Interpretability and Robustness for Audio, Speech, and Languag

Streaming Small-Footprint Keyword Spotting using Sequence-to-Sequence Models

We develop streaming keyword spotting systems using a recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T) model: an all-neural, end-to-end trained, sequence-to-sequence model which jointly learns acoustic and language model components. Our models are trained to predict either phonemes or graphemes as subword units, thus allowing us to detect arbitrary keyword phrases, without any out-of-vocabulary words. In order to adapt the models to the requirements of keyword spotting, we propose a novel technique which biases the RNN-T system towards a specific keyword of interest. Our systems are compared against a strong sequence-trained, connectionist temporal classification (CTC) based "keyword-filler" baseline, which is augmented with a separate phoneme language model. Overall, our RNN-T system with the proposed biasing technique significantly improves performance over the baseline system.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of IEEE ASRU 201

Online Keyword Spotting with a Character-Level Recurrent Neural Network

In this paper, we propose a context-aware keyword spotting model employing a character-level recurrent neural network (RNN) for spoken term detection in continuous speech. The RNN is end-to-end trained with connectionist temporal classification (CTC) to generate the probabilities of character and word-boundary labels. There is no need for the phonetic transcription, senone modeling, or system dictionary in training and testing. Also, keywords can easily be added and modified by editing the text based keyword list without retraining the RNN. Moreover, the unidirectional RNN processes an infinitely long input audio streams without pre-segmentation and keywords are detected with low-latency before the utterance is finished. Experimental results show that the proposed keyword spotter significantly outperforms the deep neural network (DNN) and hidden Markov model (HMM) based keyword-filler model even with less computations

Domain Aware Training for Far-field Small-footprint Keyword Spotting

In this paper, we focus on the task of small-footprint keyword spotting under the far-field scenario. Far-field environments are commonly encountered in real-life speech applications, causing severe degradation of performance due to room reverberation and various kinds of noises. Our baseline system is built on the convolutional neural network trained with pooled data of both far-field and close-talking speech. To cope with the distortions, we develop three domain aware training systems, including the domain embedding system, the deep CORAL system, and the multi-task learning system. These methods incorporate domain knowledge into network training and improve the performance of the keyword classifier on far-field conditions. Experimental results show that our proposed methods manage to maintain the performance on the close-talking speech and achieve significant improvement on the far-field test set.Comment: Submitted to INTERSPEECH 202

Zone-based Keyword Spotting in Bangla and Devanagari Documents

In this paper we present a word spotting system in text lines for offline Indic scripts such as Bangla (Bengali) and Devanagari. Recently, it was shown that zone-wise recognition method improves the word recognition performance than conventional full word recognition system in Indic scripts. Inspired with this idea we consider the zone segmentation approach and use middle zone information to improve the traditional word spotting performance. To avoid the problem of zone segmentation using heuristic approach, we propose here an HMM based approach to segment the upper and lower zone components from the text line images. The candidate keywords are searched from a line without segmenting characters or words. Also, we propose a novel feature combining foreground and background information of text line images for keyword-spotting by character filler models. A significant improvement in performance is noted by using both foreground and background information than their individual one. Pyramid Histogram of Oriented Gradient (PHOG) feature has been used in our word spotting framework. From the experiment, it has been noted that the proposed zone-segmentation based system outperforms traditional approaches of word spotting.Comment: Preprint Submitte