20,874 research outputs found
Content Recognition and Context Modeling for Document Analysis and Retrieval
The nature and scope of available documents are changing significantly in many areas of document analysis and retrieval as complex, heterogeneous collections become accessible to virtually everyone via the web. The increasing level of diversity presents a great challenge for document image content categorization, indexing, and retrieval. Meanwhile, the processing of documents with unconstrained layouts and complex formatting often requires effective leveraging of broad contextual knowledge.
In this dissertation, we first present a novel approach for document image content categorization, using a lexicon of shape features. Each lexical word corresponds to a scale and rotation invariant local shape feature that is generic enough to be detected repeatably and is segmentation free. A concise, structurally indexed shape lexicon is learned by clustering and partitioning feature types through graph cuts. Our idea finds successful application in several challenging tasks, including content recognition of diverse web images and language identification on documents composed of mixed machine printed text and handwriting.
Second, we address two fundamental problems in signature-based document image retrieval. Facing continually increasing volumes of documents, detecting and recognizing unique, evidentiary visual entities (\eg, signatures and logos) provides a practical and reliable supplement to the OCR recognition of printed text. We propose a novel multi-scale framework to detect and segment signatures jointly from document images, based on the structural saliency under a signature production model. We formulate the problem of signature retrieval in the unconstrained setting of geometry-invariant deformable shape matching and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in signature matching and verification.
Third, we present a model-based approach for extracting relevant named entities from unstructured documents. In a wide range of applications that require structured information from diverse, unstructured document images, processing OCR text does not give satisfactory results due to the absence of linguistic context. Our approach enables learning of inference rules collectively based on contextual information from both page layout and text features.
Finally, we demonstrate the importance of mining general web user behavior data for improving document ranking and other web search experience. The context of web user activities reveals their preferences and intents, and we emphasize the analysis of individual user sessions for creating aggregate models. We introduce a novel algorithm for estimating web page and web site importance, and discuss its theoretical foundation based on an intentional surfer model. We demonstrate that our approach significantly improves large-scale document retrieval performance
Measuring concept similarities in multimedia ontologies: analysis and evaluations
The recent development of large-scale multimedia concept ontologies has provided a new momentum for research in the semantic analysis of multimedia repositories. Different methods for generic concept detection have been extensively studied, but the question of how to exploit the structure of a multimedia ontology and existing inter-concept relations has not received similar attention. In this paper, we present a clustering-based method for modeling semantic concepts on low-level feature spaces and study the evaluation of the quality of such models with entropy-based methods. We cover a variety of methods for assessing the similarity of different concepts in a multimedia ontology. We study three ontologies and apply the proposed techniques in experiments involving the visual and semantic similarities, manual annotation of video, and concept detection. The results show that modeling inter-concept relations can provide a promising resource for many different application areas in semantic multimedia processing
Learning to Read by Spelling: Towards Unsupervised Text Recognition
This work presents a method for visual text recognition without using any
paired supervisory data. We formulate the text recognition task as one of
aligning the conditional distribution of strings predicted from given text
images, with lexically valid strings sampled from target corpora. This enables
fully automated, and unsupervised learning from just line-level text-images,
and unpaired text-string samples, obviating the need for large aligned
datasets. We present detailed analysis for various aspects of the proposed
method, namely - (1) impact of the length of training sequences on convergence,
(2) relation between character frequencies and the order in which they are
learnt, (3) generalisation ability of our recognition network to inputs of
arbitrary lengths, and (4) impact of varying the text corpus on recognition
accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate excellent text recognition accuracy on both
synthetically generated text images, and scanned images of real printed books,
using no labelled training examples
A framework for interrogating social media images to reveal an emergent archive of war
The visual image has long been central to how war is seen, contested and legitimised, remembered and forgotten. Archives are pivotal to these ends as is their ownership and access, from state and other official repositories through to the countless photographs scattered and hidden from a collective understanding of what war looks like in individual collections and dusty attics. With the advent and rapid development of social media, however, the amateur and the professional, the illicit and the sanctioned, the personal and the official, and the past and the present, all seem to inhabit the same connected and chaotic space.However, to even begin to render intelligible the complexity, scale and volume of what war looks like in social media archives is a considerable task, given the limitations of any traditional human-based method of collection and analysis. We thus propose the production of a series of âsnapshotsâ, using computer-aided extraction and identification techniques to try to offer an experimental way in to conceiving a new imaginary of war. We were particularly interested in testing to see if twentieth century wars, obviously initially captured via pre-digital means, had become more âsettledâ over time in terms of their remediated presence today through their visual representations and connections on social media, compared with wars fought in digital media ecologies (i.e. those fought and initially represented amidst the volume and pervasiveness of social media images).To this end, we developed a framework for automatically extracting and analysing war images that appear in social media, using both the features of the images themselves, and the text and metadata associated with each image. The framework utilises a workflow comprising four core stages: (1) information retrieval, (2) data pre-processing, (3) feature extraction, and (4) machine learning. Our corpus was drawn from the social media platforms Facebook and Flickr
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
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