806 research outputs found
Enhancing Energy Minimization Framework for Scene Text Recognition with Top-Down Cues
Recognizing scene text is a challenging problem, even more so than the
recognition of scanned documents. This problem has gained significant attention
from the computer vision community in recent years, and several methods based
on energy minimization frameworks and deep learning approaches have been
proposed. In this work, we focus on the energy minimization framework and
propose a model that exploits both bottom-up and top-down cues for recognizing
cropped words extracted from street images. The bottom-up cues are derived from
individual character detections from an image. We build a conditional random
field model on these detections to jointly model the strength of the detections
and the interactions between them. These interactions are top-down cues
obtained from a lexicon-based prior, i.e., language statistics. The optimal
word represented by the text image is obtained by minimizing the energy
function corresponding to the random field model. We evaluate our proposed
algorithm extensively on a number of cropped scene text benchmark datasets,
namely Street View Text, ICDAR 2003, 2011 and 2013 datasets, and IIIT 5K-word,
and show better performance than comparable methods. We perform a rigorous
analysis of all the steps in our approach and analyze the results. We also show
that state-of-the-art convolutional neural network features can be integrated
in our framework to further improve the recognition performance
Three-stage ensemble of image net pre-trained networks for pneumonia detection
Focusing on detection of pneumenia disease in the Chest X-Ray images, this paper proposes a three-stage ensemble methodology utilizing multiple pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). In the first-stage ensemble, k subsets of training data are firstly randomly generated, each of which is then used to retrain a pre-trained CNN to produce k CNN models for the ensemble in the first stage. In the second-stage ensemble, multiple ensemble CNN models based on multiple pre-trained CNNs are integrated to reduce variance and improve the performance of the prediction. The third-stage ensemble is based on image augmentation, i.e., the original set of images are augmented to generate a few sets of additional images, after which each set of images are input to the ensemble models from the first two stages, and the outputs based multiple sets of images are then integrated. In integrating outputs in each stage, four ensemble techniques are introduced including averaging, feed forward neural network-based, decision tree-based, and majority voting. Thorough experiments were conducted on Chest X-Ray images from a Kaggle challenge, and the results showed the effectiveness of the proposed three-stage ensemble method in detecting pneumonia disease in the images
A limited-size ensemble of homogeneous CNN/LSTMs for high-performance word classification
The strength of long short-term memory neural networks (LSTMs) that have been applied is more located in handling sequences of variable length than in handling geometric variability of the image patterns. In this paper, an end-to-end convolutional LSTM neural network is used to handle both geometric variation and sequence variability. The best results for LSTMs are often based on large-scale training of an ensemble of network instances. We show that high performances can be reached on a common benchmark set by using proper data augmentation for just five such networks using a proper coding scheme and a proper voting scheme. The networks have similar architectures (convolutional neural network (CNN): five layers, bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM): three layers followed by a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) processing step). The approach assumes differently scaled input images and different feature map sizes. Three datasets are used: the standard benchmark RIMES dataset (French); a historical handwritten dataset KdK (Dutch); the standard benchmark George Washington (GW) dataset (English). Final performance obtained for the word-recognition test of RIMES was 96.6%, a clear improvement over other state-of-the-art approaches which did not use a pre-trained network. On the KdK and GW datasets, our approach also shows good results. The proposed approach is deployed in the Monk search engine for historical-handwriting collections
WordFences: Text localization and recognition
En col·laboració amb la Universitat de Barcelona (UB) i la Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV)In recent years, text recognition has achieved remarkable success in recognizing scanned
document text. However, word recognition in natural images is still an open problem,
which generally requires time consuming post-processing steps. We present a novel architecture
for individual word detection in scene images based on semantic segmentation.
Our contributions are twofold: the concept of WordFence, which detects border areas
surrounding each individual word and a unique pixelwise weighted softmax loss function
which penalizes background and emphasizes small text regions. WordFence ensures that
each word is detected individually, and the new loss function provides a strong training
signal to both text and word border localization. The proposed technique avoids intensive
post-processing by combining semantic word segmentation with a voting scheme
for merging segmentations of multiple scales, producing an end-to-end word detection
system. We achieve superior localization recall on common benchmark datasets - 92%
recall on ICDAR11 and ICDAR13 and 63% recall on SVT. Furthermore, end-to-end
word recognition achieves state-of-the-art 86% F-Score on ICDAR13
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