Zone Segmentation and Thinning based Algorithm for Segmentation of Devnagari Text

Character segmentation of handwritten documents is an challenging research topic due to its diverse application environment.OCR can be used for automated processing and handling of forms, old corrupted reports, bank cheques, postal codes and structures. Now Segmentation of a word into characters is one of the major challenge in optical character recognition. This is even more challenging when we segment characters in an offline handwritten document and the next hurdle is presence of broken ,touching and overlapped characters in devnagari script. So, in this paper we have introduced an algorithm that will segment both broken as well as touching characters in devnagari script. Now to segment these characters the algorithm uses both zone segmentation and thinning based techniques. We have used 85 words each for isolated, broken, touching and both broken as well as touching characters individually. Results achieved while segmentation of broken as well as touching are 96.2 % on an average

Classification and Verification of Online Handwritten Signatures with Time Causal Information Theory Quantifiers

We present a new approach for online handwritten signature classification and verification based on descriptors stemming from Information Theory. The proposal uses the Shannon Entropy, the Statistical Complexity, and the Fisher Information evaluated over the Bandt and Pompe symbolization of the horizontal and vertical coordinates of signatures. These six features are easy and fast to compute, and they are the input to an One-Class Support Vector Machine classifier. The results produced surpass state-of-the-art techniques that employ higher-dimensional feature spaces which often require specialized software and hardware. We assess the consistency of our proposal with respect to the size of the training sample, and we also use it to classify the signatures into meaningful groups.Comment: Submitted to PLOS On

Addressing the Data Recency Problem in Collaborative Filtering Systems

Recommender systems are being widely applied in many E-commerce sites to suggest products, services, and information items to potential users. Collabora-tive filtering systems, the most successful recommender system technology to date, help people make choices based on the opinions of other people. While collaborative filtering systems have been a substantial success, there are sev-eral problems that researchers and commercial applications have identified: the early rater problem, the sparsity problem, and the large scale problem. Moreover, existing collaborative filtering systems do not consider data re-cency. For this reason, if a user\u27s preferences have changed over time, the sys-tems might not recognize it quickly. This thesis studies how to apply data re-cency to collaborative filtering systems to get more predictive accuracy. We define the data recency problem as the negative impact of old data on the pre-dictive accuracy of collaborative filtering systems. In order to mitigate this shortcoming, the combinations of time-based forgetting mechanisms, pruning and non-pruning strategies and linear and kernel functions, are utilized to ap-ply weights. A clustering technique is employed to detect the user\u27s changing preferences. We apply our research approach to the DeliBook dataset. The goal of our experiments is to show that our algorithm that incorporates tempo-ral factors provides better recommendations than existing methods

Online Spectral Clustering on Network Streams

Graph is an extremely useful representation of a wide variety of practical systems in data analysis. Recently, with the fast accumulation of stream data from various type of networks, significant research interests have arisen on spectral clustering for network streams (or evolving networks). Compared with the general spectral clustering problem, the data analysis of this new type of problems may have additional requirements, such as short processing time, scalability in distributed computing environments, and temporal variation tracking. However, to design a spectral clustering method to satisfy these requirements certainly presents non-trivial efforts. There are three major challenges for the new algorithm design. The first challenge is online clustering computation. Most of the existing spectral methods on evolving networks are off-line methods, using standard eigensystem solvers such as the Lanczos method. It needs to recompute solutions from scratch at each time point. The second challenge is the parallelization of algorithms. To parallelize such algorithms is non-trivial since standard eigen solvers are iterative algorithms and the number of iterations can not be predetermined. The third challenge is the very limited existing work. In addition, there exists multiple limitations in the existing method, such as computational inefficiency on large similarity changes, the lack of sound theoretical basis, and the lack of effective way to handle accumulated approximate errors and large data variations over time. In this thesis, we proposed a new online spectral graph clustering approach with a family of three novel spectrum approximation algorithms. Our algorithms incrementally update the eigenpairs in an online manner to improve the computational performance. Our approaches outperformed the existing method in computational efficiency and scalability while retaining competitive or even better clustering accuracy. We derived our spectrum approximation techniques GEPT and EEPT through formal theoretical analysis. The well established matrix perturbation theory forms a solid theoretic foundation for our online clustering method. We facilitated our clustering method with a new metric to track accumulated approximation errors and measure the short-term temporal variation. The metric not only provides a balance between computational efficiency and clustering accuracy, but also offers a useful tool to adapt the online algorithm to the condition of unexpected drastic noise. In addition, we discussed our preliminary work on approximate graph mining with evolutionary process, non-stationary Bayesian Network structure learning from non-stationary time series data, and Bayesian Network structure learning with text priors imposed by non-parametric hierarchical topic modeling

The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia

By sequencing 523 ancient humans, we show that the primary source of ancestry in modern South Asians is a prehistoric genetic gradient between people related to early hunter-gatherers of Iran and Southeast Asia. After the Indus Valley Civilization’s decline, its people mixed with individuals in the southeast to form one of the two main ancestral populations of South Asia, whose direct descendants live in southern India. Simultaneously, they mixed with descendants of Steppe pastoralists who, starting around 4000 years ago, spread via Central Asia to form the other main ancestral population. The Steppe ancestry in South Asia has the same profile as that in Bronze Age Eastern Europe, tracking a movement of people that affected both regions and that likely spread the distinctive features shared between Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages

Character Recognition

Character recognition is one of the pattern recognition technologies that are most widely used in practical applications. This book presents recent advances that are relevant to character recognition, from technical topics such as image processing, feature extraction or classification, to new applications including human-computer interfaces. The goal of this book is to provide a reference source for academic research and for professionals working in the character recognition field