323 research outputs found
READ-BAD: A New Dataset and Evaluation Scheme for Baseline Detection in Archival Documents
Text line detection is crucial for any application associated with Automatic
Text Recognition or Keyword Spotting. Modern algorithms perform good on
well-established datasets since they either comprise clean data or
simple/homogeneous page layouts. We have collected and annotated 2036 archival
document images from different locations and time periods. The dataset contains
varying page layouts and degradations that challenge text line segmentation
methods. Well established text line segmentation evaluation schemes such as the
Detection Rate or Recognition Accuracy demand for binarized data that is
annotated on a pixel level. Producing ground truth by these means is laborious
and not needed to determine a method's quality. In this paper we propose a new
evaluation scheme that is based on baselines. The proposed scheme has no need
for binarization and it can handle skewed as well as rotated text lines. The
ICDAR 2017 Competition on Baseline Detection and the ICDAR 2017 Competition on
Layout Analysis for Challenging Medieval Manuscripts used this evaluation
scheme. Finally, we present results achieved by a recently published text line
detection algorithm.Comment: Submitted to DAS201
Baseline Detection in Historical Documents using Convolutional U-Nets
Baseline detection is still a challenging task for heterogeneous collections
of historical documents. We present a novel approach to baseline extraction in
such settings, turning out the winning entry to the ICDAR 2017 Competition on
Baseline detection (cBAD). It utilizes deep convolutional nets (CNNs) for both,
the actual extraction of baselines, as well as for a simple form of layout
analysis in a pre-processing step. To the best of our knowledge it is the first
CNN-based system for baseline extraction applying a U-net architecture and
sliding window detection, profiting from a high local accuracy of the candidate
lines extracted. Final baseline post-processing complements our approach,
compensating for inaccuracies mainly due to missing context information during
sliding window detection. We experimentally evaluate the components of our
system individually on the cBAD dataset. Moreover, we investigate how it
generalizes to different data by means of the dataset used for the baseline
extraction task of the ICDAR 2017 Competition on Layout Analysis for
Challenging Medieval Manuscripts (HisDoc). A comparison with the results
reported for HisDoc shows that it also outperforms the contestants of the
latter.Comment: 6 pages, accepted to DAS 201
The Robust Reading Competition Annotation and Evaluation Platform
The ICDAR Robust Reading Competition (RRC), initiated in 2003 and
re-established in 2011, has become a de-facto evaluation standard for robust
reading systems and algorithms. Concurrent with its second incarnation in 2011,
a continuous effort started to develop an on-line framework to facilitate the
hosting and management of competitions. This paper outlines the Robust Reading
Competition Annotation and Evaluation Platform, the backbone of the
competitions. The RRC Annotation and Evaluation Platform is a modular
framework, fully accessible through on-line interfaces. It comprises a
collection of tools and services for managing all processes involved with
defining and evaluating a research task, from dataset definition to annotation
management, evaluation specification and results analysis. Although the
framework has been designed with robust reading research in mind, many of the
provided tools are generic by design. All aspects of the RRC Annotation and
Evaluation Framework are available for research use.Comment: 6 pages, accepted to DAS 201
DeepOtsu: Document Enhancement and Binarization using Iterative Deep Learning
This paper presents a novel iterative deep learning framework and apply it
for document enhancement and binarization. Unlike the traditional methods which
predict the binary label of each pixel on the input image, we train the neural
network to learn the degradations in document images and produce the uniform
images of the degraded input images, which allows the network to refine the
output iteratively. Two different iterative methods have been studied in this
paper: recurrent refinement (RR) which uses the same trained neural network in
each iteration for document enhancement and stacked refinement (SR) which uses
a stack of different neural networks for iterative output refinement. Given the
learned uniform and enhanced image, the binarization map can be easy to obtain
by a global or local threshold. The experimental results on several public
benchmark data sets show that our proposed methods provide a new clean version
of the degraded image which is suitable for visualization and promising results
of binarization using the global Otsu's threshold based on the enhanced images
learned iteratively by the neural network.Comment: Accepted by Pattern Recognitio
A Comprehensive Study of ImageNet Pre-Training for Historical Document Image Analysis
Automatic analysis of scanned historical documents comprises a wide range of
image analysis tasks, which are often challenging for machine learning due to a
lack of human-annotated learning samples. With the advent of deep neural
networks, a promising way to cope with the lack of training data is to
pre-train models on images from a different domain and then fine-tune them on
historical documents. In the current research, a typical example of such
cross-domain transfer learning is the use of neural networks that have been
pre-trained on the ImageNet database for object recognition. It remains a
mostly open question whether or not this pre-training helps to analyse
historical documents, which have fundamentally different image properties when
compared with ImageNet. In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical
survey on the effect of ImageNet pre-training for diverse historical document
analysis tasks, including character recognition, style classification,
manuscript dating, semantic segmentation, and content-based retrieval. While we
obtain mixed results for semantic segmentation at pixel-level, we observe a
clear trend across different network architectures that ImageNet pre-training
has a positive effect on classification as well as content-based retrieval
A Set of Benchmarks for Handwritten Text Recognition on Historical Documents
[EN] Handwritten Text Recognition is a important requirement in order to make visible the contents of the myriads of historical documents residing in public and private archives and libraries world wide. Automatic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is a challenging problem that requires a careful combination of several advanced Pattern Recognition techniques, including but not limited to Image Processing, Document Image Analysis, Feature Extraction, Neural Network approaches and Language Modeling. The progress of this kind of systems is strongly bound by the availability of adequate benchmarking datasets, software tools and reproducible results achieved using the corresponding tools and datasets. Based on English and German historical documents proposed in recent open competitions at ICDAR and ICFHR conferences between 2014 and 2017, this paper introduces four HTR benchmarks in order of increasing complexity from several points of view. For each benchmark, a specific system is proposed which overcomes results published so far under comparable conditions. Therefore, this paper establishes new state of the art baseline systems and results which aim at becoming new challenges that would hopefully drive further improvement of HTR technologies. Both the datasets and the software tools used to implement the baseline systems are made freely accessible for research purposes. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.This work has been partially supported through the European Union's H2020 grant READ (Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents) (Ref: 674943), as well as by the BBVA Foundation through the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 Digital Humanities research grants "Carabela" and "HisClima - Dos Siglos de Datos Cilmaticos", and by EU JPICH project "HOME - History Of Medieval Europe" (Spanish PEICTI Ref. PC12018-093122).Sánchez Peiró, JA.; Romero, V.; Toselli, AH.; Villegas, M.; Vidal, E. (2019). A Set of Benchmarks for Handwritten Text Recognition on Historical Documents. Pattern Recognition. 94:122-134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2019.05.025S1221349
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