Template Based Recognition of On-Line Handwriting

Software for recognition of handwriting has been available for several decades now and research on the subject have produced several different strategies for producing competitive recognition accuracies, especially in the case of isolated single characters. The problem of recognizing samples of handwriting with arbitrary connections between constituent characters (emph{unconstrained handwriting}) adds considerable complexity in form of the segmentation problem. In other words a recognition system, not constrained to the isolated single character case, needs to be able to recognize where in the sample one letter ends and another begins. In the research community and probably also in commercial systems the most common technique for recognizing unconstrained handwriting compromise Neural Networks for partial character matching along with Hidden Markov Modeling for combining partial results to string hypothesis. Neural Networks are often favored by the research community since the recognition functions are more or less automatically inferred from a training set of handwritten samples. From a commercial perspective a downside to this property is the lack of control, since there is no explicit information on the types of samples that can be correctly recognized by the system. In a template based system, each style of writing a particular character is explicitly modeled, and thus provides some intuition regarding the types of errors (confusions) that the system is prone to make. Most template based recognition methods today only work for the isolated single character recognition problem and extensions to unconstrained recognition is usually not straightforward. This thesis presents a step-by-step recipe for producing a template based recognition system which extends naturally to unconstrained handwriting recognition through simple graph techniques. A system based on this construction has been implemented and tested for the difficult case of unconstrained online Arabic handwriting recognition with good results

Advances in Character Recognition

This book presents advances in character recognition, and it consists of 12 chapters that cover wide range of topics on different aspects of character recognition. Hopefully, this book will serve as a reference source for academic research, for professionals working in the character recognition field and for all interested in the subject

Deep Recurrent Networks for Gesture Recognition and Synthesis

It is hard to overstate the importance of gesture-based interfaces in many applications nowadays. The adoption of such interfaces stems from the opportunities they create for incorporating natural and fluid user interactions. This highlights the importance of having gesture recognizers that are not only accurate but also easy to adopt. The ever-growing popularity of machine learning has prompted many application developers to integrate automatic methods of recognition into their products. On the one hand, deep learning often tops the list of the most powerful and robust recognizers. These methods have been consistently shown to outperform all other machine learning methods in a variety of tasks. On the other hand, deep networks can be overwhelming to use for a majority of developers, requiring a lot of tuning and tweaking to work as expected. Additionally, these networks are infamous for their requirement for large amounts of training data, further hampering their adoption in scenarios where labeled data is limited. In this dissertation, we aim to bridge the gap between the power of deep learning methods and their adoption into gesture recognition workflows. To this end, we introduce two deep network models for recognition. These models are similar in spirit, but target different application domains: one is designed for segmented gesture recognition, while the other is suitable for continuous data, tackling segmentation and recognition problems simultaneously. The distinguishing characteristic of these networks is their simplicity, small number of free parameters, and their use of common building blocks that come standard with any modern deep learning framework, making them easy to implement, train and adopt. Through evaluations, we show that our proposed models achieve state-of-the-art results in various recognition tasks and application domains spanning different input devices and interaction modalities. We demonstrate that the infamy of deep networks due to their demand for powerful hardware as well as large amounts of data is an unfair assessment. On the contrary, we show that in the absence of such data, our proposed models can be quickly trained while achieving competitive recognition accuracy. Next, we explore the problem of synthetic gesture generation: a measure often taken to address the shortage of labeled data. We extend our proposed recognition models and demonstrate that the same models can be used in a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architecture for synthetic gesture generation. Specifically, we show that our original recognizer can be used as the discriminator in such frameworks, while its slightly modified version can act as the gesture generator. We then formulate a novel loss function for our gesture generator, which entirely replaces the need for a discriminator network in our generative model, thereby significantly reducing the complexity of our framework. Through evaluations, we show that our model is able to improve the recognition accuracy of multiple recognizers across a variety of datasets. Through user studies, we additionally show that human evaluators mistake our synthetic samples with the real ones frequently indicating that our synthetic samples are visually realistic. Additional resources for this dissertation (such as demo videos and public source codes) are available at https://www.maghoumi.com/dissertatio

An Expert System for Guitar Sheet Music to Guitar Tablature

This project applies analysis, design and implementation of the Optical Music Recognition (OMR) to an expert system for transforming guitar sheet music to guitar tablature. The first part includes image processing and music semantic interpretation to interpret and transform sheet music or printed scores into editable and playable electronic form. Then after importing the electronic form of music into internal data structures, our application uses effective pruning to explore the entire search space to find the best guitar tablature. Also considered are alternate guitar tunings and transposition of the music to improve the resulting tablature

Algorithms and Numerical Methods for Electrical Brain Imaging

Electrical brain imaging (EBI) refers to a set of techniques that exploit either the spontaneous electrical activity of the central nervous system, as in electroencephalographic (EEG) source reconstruction, or make use of external current injections, as in electrical impedance tomography (EIT) , to image the structure or function of the brain. When compared to other brain imaging methods used in research or in the clinical setting, such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), functional MRI (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET) and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), EIT and EEG source localization instrumentation offer the advantages of portability, low cost, high temporal resolution [ms] and quick setup. The downsides are a low spatial resolution [cm], high computational cost of the image reconstruction process and high sensitivity to imperfections of the electrical model of the head. In this work, a new special purpose reconstruction algorithm for EIT is presented and validated wth experimental measurements performed on a cylindrical phantom and on a simulated human head. The algorithm focuses on the quick detection of compact conductivity contrasts in imperfectly known in 3D domains. The performance of the proposed algorithm is then compared to the one of a benchmark reconstruction method in the EIT field, Tikhonov regularized reconstruction, with stroke detection and classification as a case study. Moreover, the possible application of EIT imaging to the detection of epileptic foci with intracranial deep electrodes (stereoelectroencephalography or SEEG) is explored. Finally, EEG source reconstruction algorithms are implemented on a heterogeneous multi-CPU and multi-GPU computing system to significantly reduce the reconstruction time

Quantifying atherosclerosis in vasculature using ultrasound imaging

Cerebrovascular disease accounts for approximately 30% of the global burden associated with cardiovascular diseases [1]. According to the World Stroke Organisation, there are approximately 13.7 million new stroke cases annually, and just under six million people will die from stroke each year [2]. The underlying cause of this disease is atherosclerosis – a vascular pathology which is characterised by thickening and hardening of blood vessel walls. When fatty substances such as cholesterol accumulate on the inner linings of an artery, they cause a progressive narrowing of the lumen referred to as a stenosis. Localisation and grading of the severity of a stenosis, is important for practitioners to assess the risk of rupture which leads to stroke. Ultrasound imaging is popular for this purpose. It is low cost, non-invasive, and permits a quick assessment of vessel geometry and stenosis by measuring the intima media thickness. Research is showing that 3D monitoring of plaque progression may provide a better indication of sites which are at risk of rupture. Various metrics have been proposed. From these, the quantification of plaques by measuring vessel wall volume (VWV) using the segmented media-adventitia boundaries (MAB) and lumen-intima boundaries (LIB) has been shown to be sensitive to temporal changes in carotid plaque burden. Thus, methods to segment these boundaries are required to help generate VWV measurements with high accuracy, less user interaction and increased robustness to variability in di↵erent user acquisition protocols.ii This work proposes three novel methods to address these requirements, to ultimately produce a highly accurate, fully automated segmentation algorithm which works on intensity-invariant data. The first method proposed was that of generating a novel, intensity-invariant representation of ultrasound data by creating phase-congruency maps from raw unprocessed radio-frequency ultrasound information. Experiments carried out showed that this representation retained the necessary anatomical structural information to facilitate segmentation, while concurrently being invariant to changes in amplitude from the user. The second method proposed was the novel application of Deep Convolutional Networks (DCN) to carotid ultrasound images to achieve fully automatic delineation of the MAB boundaries, in addition to the use of a novel fusion of amplitude and phase congruency data as an image source. Experiments carried out showed that the DCN produces highly accurate and automated results, and that the fusion of amplitude and phase yield superior results to either one alone. The third method proposed was a new geometrically constrained objective function for the network's Stochastic Gradient Descent optimisation, thus tuning it to the segmentation problem at hand, while also developing the network further to concurrently delineate both the MAB and LIB to produce vessel wall contours. Experiments carried out here also show that the novel geometric constraints improve the segmentation results on both MAB and LIB contours. In conclusion, the presented work provides significant novel contributions to field of Carotid Ultrasound segmentation, and with future work, this could lead to implementations which facilitate plaque progression analysis for the end�user