Visual Re-ranking with Natural Language Understanding for Text Spotting

Many scene text recognition approaches are based on purely visual information and ignore the semantic relation between scene and text. In this paper, we tackle this problem from natural language processing perspective to fill the gap between language and vision. We propose a post-processing approach to improve scene text recognition accuracy by using occurrence probabilities of words (unigram language model), and the semantic correlation between scene and text. For this, we initially rely on an off-the-shelf deep neural network, already trained with a large amount of data, which provides a series of text hypotheses per input image. These hypotheses are then re-ranked using word frequencies and semantic relatedness with objects or scenes in the image. As a result of this combination, the performance of the original network is boosted with almost no additional cost. We validate our approach on ICDAR'17 dataset.Comment: Accepted by ACCV 2018. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1810.0977

Visual re-ranking with natural language understanding for text spotting

The final publication is available at link.springer.comMany scene text recognition approaches are based on purely visual information and ignore the semantic relation between scene and text. In this paper, we tackle this problem from natural language processing perspective to fill the gap between language and vision. We propose a post processing approach to improve scene text recognition accuracy by using occurrence probabilities of words (unigram language model), and the semantic correlation between scene and text. For this, we initially rely on an off-the-shelf deep neural network, already trained with large amount of data, which provides a series of text hypotheses per input image. These hypotheses are then re-ranked using word frequencies and semantic relatedness with objects or scenes in the image. As a result of this combination, the performance of the original network is boosted with almost no additional cost. We validate our approach on ICDAR'17 dataset.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Learning Semantic Features For Visual Recognition

Visual recognition (e.g., object, scene and action recognition) is an active area of research in computer vision due to its increasing number of real-world applications such as video (image) indexing and search, intelligent surveillance, human-machine interaction, robot navigation, etc. Effective modeling of the objects, scenes and actions is critical for visual recognition. Recently, bag of visual words (BoVW) representation, in which the image patches or video cuboids are quantized into visual words (i.e., mid-level features) based on their appearance similarity using clustering, has been widely and successfully explored. The advantages of this representation are: no explicit detection of objects or object parts and their tracking are required; the representation is somewhat tolerant to within-class deformations, and it is efficient for matching. However, the performance of the BoVW is sensitive to the size of the visual vocabulary. Therefore, computationally expensive cross-validation is needed to find the appropriate quantization granularity. This limitation is partially due to the fact that the visual words are not semantically meaningful. This limits the effectiveness and compactness of the representation. To overcome these shortcomings, in this thesis we present principled approach to learn a semantic vocabulary (i.e. high-level features) from a large amount of visual words (mid-level features). In this context, the thesis makes two major contributions. First, we have developed an algorithm to discover a compact yet discriminative semantic vocabulary. This vocabulary is obtained by grouping the visual-words based on their distribution in videos (images) into visual-word clusters. The mutual information (MI) be- tween the clusters and the videos (images) depicts the discriminative power of the semantic vocabulary, while the MI between visual-words and visual-word clusters measures the compactness of the vocabulary. We apply the information bottleneck (IB) algorithm to find the optimal number of visual-word clusters by finding the good tradeoff between compactness and discriminative power. We tested our proposed approach on the state-of-the-art KTH dataset, and obtained average accuracy of 94.2%. However, this approach performs one-side clustering, because only visual words are clustered regardless of which video they appear in. In order to leverage the co-occurrence of visual words and images, we have developed the co-clustering algorithm to simultaneously group the visual words and images. We tested our approach on the publicly available fifteen scene dataset and have obtained about 4% increase in the average accuracy compared to the one side clustering approaches. Second, instead of grouping the mid-level features, we first embed the features into a low-dimensional semantic space by manifold learning, and then perform the clustering. We apply Diffusion Maps (DM) to capture the local geometric structure of the mid-level feature space. The DM embedding is able to preserve the explicitly defined diffusion distance, which reflects the semantic similarity between any two features. Furthermore, the DM provides multi-scale analysis capability by adjusting the time steps in the Markov transition matrix. The experiments on KTH dataset show that DM can perform much better (about 3% to 6% improvement in average accuracy) than other manifold learning approaches and IB method. Above methods use only single type of features. In order to combine multiple heterogeneous features for visual recognition, we further propose the Fielder Embedding to capture the complicated semantic relationships between all entities (i.e., videos, images,heterogeneous features). The discovered relationships are then employed to further increase the recognition rate. We tested our approach on Weizmann dataset, and achieved about 17% 21% improvements in the average accuracy

Scene classification using spatial pyramid matching and hierarchical Dirichlet processes

The goal of scene classification is to automatically assign a scene image to a semantic category (i.e. building or river ) based on analyzing the visual contents of this image. This is a challenging problem due to the scene images\u27 variability, ambiguity, and a wide range of illumination or scale conditions that may apply. On the contrary, it is a fundamental problem in computer vision and can be used to guide other processes such as image browsing, contentbased image retrieval and object recognition by providing contextual information. This thesis implemented two scene classification systems: one is based on Spatial Pyramid Matching (SPM) and the other one is applying Hierarchical Dirichlet Processes (HDP). Both approaches are based on the most popular bag-of-words representation, which is a histogram of quantized visual features. SPM represents an image as a spatial pyramid which is produced by computing histograms of local features for multiple levels with different resolutions. Spatial Pyramid Matching is then used to estimate the overall perceptual similarity between images which can be used as a support vector machine (SVM) kernel. In the second approach, HDP is used to model the bag-of-words representations of images; each image is described as a mixture of latent themes and each theme is described as a mixture of words. The number of themes is automatically inferred from data. The themes are shared by images not only inside one scene category but also across all categories. Both systems are tested on three popular datasets from the field and their performances are compared. In addition, the two approaches are combined, resulting in performance improvement over either separate system

Visual Semantic Re-ranker for Text Spotting

Many current state-of-the-art methods for text recognition are based on purely local information and ignore the semantic correlation between text and its surrounding visual context. In this paper, we propose a post-processing approach to improve the accuracy of text spotting by using the semantic relation between the text and the scene. We initially rely on an off-the-shelf deep neural network that provides a series of text hypotheses for each input image. These text hypotheses are then re-ranked using the semantic relatedness with the object in the image. As a result of this combination, the performance of the original network is boosted with a very low computational cost. The proposed framework can be used as a drop-in complement for any text-spotting algorithm that outputs a ranking of word hypotheses. We validate our approach on ICDAR'17 shared task dataset