1,867 research outputs found
Learning Spatial-Semantic Context with Fully Convolutional Recurrent Network for Online Handwritten Chinese Text Recognition
Online handwritten Chinese text recognition (OHCTR) is a challenging problem
as it involves a large-scale character set, ambiguous segmentation, and
variable-length input sequences. In this paper, we exploit the outstanding
capability of path signature to translate online pen-tip trajectories into
informative signature feature maps using a sliding window-based method,
successfully capturing the analytic and geometric properties of pen strokes
with strong local invariance and robustness. A multi-spatial-context fully
convolutional recurrent network (MCFCRN) is proposed to exploit the multiple
spatial contexts from the signature feature maps and generate a prediction
sequence while completely avoiding the difficult segmentation problem.
Furthermore, an implicit language model is developed to make predictions based
on semantic context within a predicting feature sequence, providing a new
perspective for incorporating lexicon constraints and prior knowledge about a
certain language in the recognition procedure. Experiments on two standard
benchmarks, Dataset-CASIA and Dataset-ICDAR, yielded outstanding results, with
correct rates of 97.10% and 97.15%, respectively, which are significantly
better than the best result reported thus far in the literature.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure
COMIC: Towards A Compact Image Captioning Model with Attention
Recent works in image captioning have shown very promising raw performance.
However, we realize that most of these encoder-decoder style networks with
attention do not scale naturally to large vocabulary size, making them
difficult to be deployed on embedded system with limited hardware resources.
This is because the size of word and output embedding matrices grow
proportionally with the size of vocabulary, adversely affecting the compactness
of these networks. To address this limitation, this paper introduces a brand
new idea in the domain of image captioning. That is, we tackle the problem of
compactness of image captioning models which is hitherto unexplored. We showed
that, our proposed model, named COMIC for COMpact Image Captioning, achieves
comparable results in five common evaluation metrics with state-of-the-art
approaches on both MS-COCO and InstaPIC-1.1M datasets despite having an
embedding vocabulary size that is 39x - 99x smaller. The source code and models
are available at:
https://github.com/jiahuei/COMIC-Compact-Image-Captioning-with-AttentionComment: Added source code link and new results in Table
Unconstrained Scene Text and Video Text Recognition for Arabic Script
Building robust recognizers for Arabic has always been challenging. We
demonstrate the effectiveness of an end-to-end trainable CNN-RNN hybrid
architecture in recognizing Arabic text in videos and natural scenes. We
outperform previous state-of-the-art on two publicly available video text
datasets - ALIF and ACTIV. For the scene text recognition task, we introduce a
new Arabic scene text dataset and establish baseline results. For scripts like
Arabic, a major challenge in developing robust recognizers is the lack of large
quantity of annotated data. We overcome this by synthesising millions of Arabic
text images from a large vocabulary of Arabic words and phrases. Our
implementation is built on top of the model introduced here [37] which is
proven quite effective for English scene text recognition. The model follows a
segmentation-free, sequence to sequence transcription approach. The network
transcribes a sequence of convolutional features from the input image to a
sequence of target labels. This does away with the need for segmenting input
image into constituent characters/glyphs, which is often difficult for Arabic
script. Further, the ability of RNNs to model contextual dependencies yields
superior recognition results.Comment: 5 page
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
Multilingual Language Processing From Bytes
We describe an LSTM-based model which we call Byte-to-Span (BTS) that reads
text as bytes and outputs span annotations of the form [start, length, label]
where start positions, lengths, and labels are separate entries in our
vocabulary. Because we operate directly on unicode bytes rather than
language-specific words or characters, we can analyze text in many languages
with a single model. Due to the small vocabulary size, these multilingual
models are very compact, but produce results similar to or better than the
state-of- the-art in Part-of-Speech tagging and Named Entity Recognition that
use only the provided training datasets (no external data sources). Our models
are learning "from scratch" in that they do not rely on any elements of the
standard pipeline in Natural Language Processing (including tokenization), and
thus can run in standalone fashion on raw text
- …