Analyse d'images de documents anciens : Catégorisation de contenus par approche texture

Nous proposons une caractérisation du contenu des ouvrages anciens basée sur une approche texture non paramétrique. Cette démarche se veut générique et adaptable à tout type d'ouvrages en s'appuyant sur l'homogénéité des textures que l'on retrouve dans un ouvrage. En appliquant à plusieurs résolutions 5 algorithmes d'extractions de textures il est possible de caractériser le contenu des pages d'un ouvrage. Cette méthode est appliquée sur des pages d'ouvrages anciens du 16ème siècle

\u3cem\u3eGRASP News\u3c/em\u3e, Volume 6, Number 1

A report of the General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception (GRASP) Laboratory, edited by Gregory Long and Alok Gupta

Analyse d'Images de Documents Anciens: une Approche Texture

In this article, we propose a method of characterization of images of old documents based on a texture approach. This characterization is carried out with the help of a multi-resolution study of the textures contained in the images of the document. Thus, by extracting five features linked to the frequencies and to the orientations in the different areas of a page, it is possible to extract and compare elements of high semantic level without expressing any hypothesis about the physical or logical structure of the analysed documents. Experimentations demonstrate the performance of our propositions and the advances that they represent in terms of characterization of content of a deeply heterogeneous corpus.Dans cet article, nous proposons une méthode de caractérisation d'images d'ouvrages anciens basée sur une approche texture. Cette caractérisation est réalisée à l'aide d'une étude multirésolution des textures contenues dans les images de documents. Ainsi, en extrayant cinq indices liés aux fréquences et aux orientations dans les différentes parties d'une page, il est possible d'extraire et de comparer des éléments de haut niveau sémantique sans émettre d'hypothèses sur la structure physique ou logique des documents analysés. Des expérimentations montrent la faisabilité de la réalisation d'outils d'aide à la navigation ou d'aide à l'indexation. Au travers de ces expérimentations, nous mettrons en avant la pertinence de ces indices et les avancées qu'ils représentent en terme de caractérisation de contenu d'un corpus fortement hétérogène

Fast Machine Learning Algorithms for Massive Datasets with Applications in the Biomedical Domain

The continuous increase in the size of datasets introduces computational challenges for machine learning algorithms. In this dissertation, we cover the machine learning algorithms and applications in large-scale data analysis in manufacturing and healthcare. We begin with introducing a multilevel framework to scale the support vector machine (SVM), a popular supervised learning algorithm with a few tunable hyperparameters and highly accurate prediction. The computational complexity of nonlinear SVM is prohibitive on large-scale datasets compared to the linear SVM, which is more scalable for massive datasets. The nonlinear SVM has shown to produce significantly higher classification quality on complex and highly imbalanced datasets. However, a higher classification quality requires a computationally expensive quadratic programming solver and extra kernel parameters for model selection. We introduce a generalized fast multilevel framework for regular, weighted, and instance weighted SVM that achieves similar or better classification quality compared to the state-of-the-art SVM libraries such as LIBSVM. Our framework improves the runtime more than two orders of magnitude for some of the well-known benchmark datasets. We cover multiple versions of our proposed framework and its implementation in detail. The framework is implemented using PETSc library which allows easy integration with scientific computing tasks. Next, we propose an adaptive multilevel learning framework for SVM to reduce the variance between prediction qualities across the levels, improve the overall prediction accuracy, and boost the runtime. We implement multi-threaded support to speed up the parameter fitting runtime that results in more than an order of magnitude speed-up. We design an early stopping criteria to reduce the extra computational cost when we achieve expected prediction quality. This approach provides significant speed-up, especially for massive datasets. Finally, we propose an efficient low dimensional feature extraction over massive knowledge networks. Knowledge networks are becoming more popular in the biomedical domain for knowledge representation. Each layer in knowledge networks can store the information from one or multiple sources of data. The relationships between concepts or between layers represent valuable information. The proposed feature engineering approach provides an efficient and highly accurate prediction of the relationship between biomedical concepts on massive datasets. Our proposed approach utilizes semantics and probabilities to reduce the potential search space for the exploration and learning of machine learning algorithms. The calculation of probabilities is highly scalable with the size of the knowledge network. The number of features is fixed and equivalent to the number of relationships or classes in the data. A comprehensive comparison of well-known classifiers such as random forest, SVM, and deep learning over various features extracted from the same dataset, provides an overview for performance and computational trade-offs. Our source code, documentation and parameters will be available at https://github.com/esadr/

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

User-driven Page Layout Analysis of historical printed Books

International audienceIn this paper, based on the study of the specificity of historical printed books, we first explain the main error sources in classical methods used for page layout analysis. We show that each method (bottom-up and top-down) provides different types of useful information that should not be ignored, if we want to obtain both a generic method and good segmentation results. Next, we propose to use a hybrid segmentation algorithm that builds two maps: a shape map that focuses on connected components and a background map, which provides information about white areas corresponding to block separations in the page. Using this first segmentation, a classification of the extracted blocks can be achieved according to scenarios produced by the user. These scenarios are defined very simply during an interactive stage. The user is able to make processing sequences adapted to the different kinds of images he is likely to meet and according to the user needs. The proposed “user-driven approach” is capable of doing segmentation and labelling of the required user high level concepts efficiently and has achieved above 93% accurate results over different data sets tested. User feedbacks and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of our framework mainly because the extraction rules can be defined without difficulty and parameters are not sensitive to page layout variation