Relation Bag-of-Features for Symbol Retrieval

International audienceIn this paper, we address a new scheme for symbol retrieval based on relation bag-of-features (BOFs) which are computed between the extracted visual primitives. Our feature consists of pairwise spatial relations from all possible combina tions of individual visual primitives. The key characteristic of the overall process is to use topological information to guide directional relations. Consequently, directional relation matching takes place only with those candidates having similar topological configurations. A comprehensive study is made by using two different datasets. Experimental tests provide interesting results by establishing user-friendly symbol retrieval application

BoR: Bag-of-Relations for Symbol Retrieval

International audienceIn this paper, we address a new scheme for symbol retrieval based on bag-of-relations (BoRs) which are computed between extracted visual primitives (e.g. circle and corner). Our features consist of pairwise spatial relations from all possible combinations of individual visual primitives. The key characteristic of the overall process is to use topological relation information indexed in bags-of-relations and use this for recognition. As a consequence, directional relation matching takes place only with those candidates having similar topological configurations. A comprehensive study is made by using several different well known datasets such as GREC, FRESH and SESYD, and includes a comparison with state-of-the-art descriptors. Experiments provide interesting results on symbol spotting and other user-friendly symbol retrieval applications

Understanding Optical Music Recognition

For over 50 years, researchers have been trying to teach computers to read music notation, referred to as Optical Music Recognition (OMR). However, this field is still difficult to access for new researchers, especially those without a significant musical background: Few introductory materials are available, and, furthermore, the field has struggled with defining itself and building a shared terminology. In this work, we address these shortcomings by (1) providing a robust definition of OMR and its relationship to related fields, (2) analyzing how OMR inverts the music encoding process to recover the musical notation and the musical semantics from documents, and (3) proposing a taxonomy of OMR, with most notably a novel taxonomy of applications. Additionally, we discuss how deep learning affects modern OMR research, as opposed to the traditional pipeline. Based on this work, the reader should be able to attain a basic understanding of OMR: its objectives, its inherent structure, its relationship to other fields, the state of the art, and the research opportunities it affords

Social shaping of digital publishing: exploring the interplay between culture and technology

The processes and forms of electronic publishing have been changing since the advent of the Web. In recent years, the open access movement has been a major driver of scholarly communication, and change is also evident in other fields such as e-government and e-learning. Whilst many changes are driven by technological advances, an altered social reality is also pushing the boundaries of digital publishing. With 23 articles and 10 posters, Elpub 2012 focuses on the social shaping of digital publishing and explores the interplay between culture and technology. This book contains the proceedings of the conference, consisting of 11 accepted full articles and 12 articles accepted as extended abstracts. The articles are presented in groups, and cover the topics: digital scholarship and publishing; special archives; libraries and repositories; digital texts and readings; and future solutions and innovations. Offering an overview of the current situation and exploring the trends of the future, this book will be of interest to all those whose work involves digital publishing

Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Knowledge Organization WissOrg'17 of theGerman Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO),30th November - 1st December 2017, Freie Universität Berlin

Wissensorganisation is the name of a series of biennial conferences / workshops with a long tradition, organized by the German chapter of the International Society of Knowledge Organization (ISKO). The 15th conference in this series, held at Freie Universität Berlin, focused on knowledge organization for the digital humanities. Structuring, and interacting with, large data collections has become a major issue in the digital humanities. In these proceedings, various aspects of knowledge organization in the digital humanities are discussed, and the authors of the papers show how projects in the digital humanities deal with knowledge organization.Wissensorganisation ist der Name einer Konferenzreihe mit einer langjährigen Tradition, die von der Deutschen Sektion der International Society of Knowledge Organization (ISKO) organisiert wird. Die 15. Konferenz dieser Reihe, die an der Freien Universität Berlin stattfand, hatte ihren Schwerpunkt im Bereich Wissensorganisation und Digital Humanities. Die Strukturierung von und die Interaktion mit großen Datenmengen ist ein zentrales Thema in den Digital Humanities. In diesem Konferenzband werden verschiedene Aspekte der Wissensorganisation in den Digital Humanities diskutiert, und die Autoren der einzelnen Beiträge zeigen, wie die Digital Humanities mit Wissensorganisation umgehen

Evaluation of the usability of certain symbols indicating automobile lighting status

The research presented in this document addresses the ability of drivers to understand what information has been presented by symbols that are used to indicate certain status of vehicle lights. The concept known as usability can be applied extensively to ergonomic design and testing of a wide range of products and systems, including cars. In order to assess drivers' understanding of what information is exactly presented by symbols that are used to describe the state of the lighting system of an automobile, a usability test was designed. The test included 4 symbols, three of which were ISO-approved symbols. This study of usability of symbols on a sample of drivers showed that understanding of information represented by symbols is relatively low, ranging from 41.93% to 61.29%. Certain statistical tests allow for prognosis results on a population level, using the data based on a sample. For that purpose, we used the Z-test of a sample proportion. Testing of statistical hypotheses yielded even lower values of symbols understanding at the population level, for each tested symbol. Suggestions have been made to improve the usability of this type of symbol

Analyse d’images de documents patrimoniaux : une approche structurelle à base de texture

Over the last few years, there has been tremendous growth in digitizing collections of cultural heritage documents. Thus, many challenges and open issues have been raised, such as information retrieval in digital libraries or analyzing page content of historical books. Recently, an important need has emerged which consists in designing a computer-aided characterization and categorization tool, able to index or group historical digitized book pages according to several criteria, mainly the layout structure and/or typographic/graphical characteristics of the historical document image content. Thus, the work conducted in this thesis presents an automatic approach for characterization and categorization of historical book pages. The proposed approach is applicable to a large variety of ancient books. In addition, it does not assume a priori knowledge regarding document image layout and content. It is based on the use of texture and graph algorithms to provide a rich and holistic description of the layout and content of the analyzed book pages to characterize and categorize historical book pages. The categorization is based on the characterization of the digitized page content by texture, shape, geometric and topological descriptors. This characterization is represented by a structural signature. More precisely, the signature-based characterization approach consists of two main stages. The first stage is extracting homogeneous regions. Then, the second one is proposing a graph-based page signature which is based on the extracted homogeneous regions, reflecting its layout and content. Afterwards, by comparing the different obtained graph-based signatures using a graph-matching paradigm, the similarities of digitized historical book page layout and/or content can be deduced. Subsequently, book pages with similar layout and/or content can be categorized and grouped, and a table of contents/summary of the analyzed digitized historical book can be provided automatically. As a consequence, numerous signature-based applications (e.g. information retrieval in digital libraries according to several criteria, page categorization) can be implemented for managing effectively a corpus or collections of books. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed page signature, a detailed experimental evaluation has been conducted in this work for assessing two possible categorization applications, unsupervised page classification and page stream segmentation. In addition, the different steps of the proposed approach have been evaluated on a large variety of historical document images.Les récents progrès dans la numérisation des collections de documents patrimoniaux ont ravivé de nouveaux défis afin de garantir une conservation durable et de fournir un accès plus large aux documents anciens. En parallèle de la recherche d'information dans les bibliothèques numériques ou l'analyse du contenu des pages numérisées dans les ouvrages anciens, la caractérisation et la catégorisation des pages d'ouvrages anciens a connu récemment un regain d'intérêt. Les efforts se concentrent autant sur le développement d'outils rapides et automatiques de caractérisation et catégorisation des pages d'ouvrages anciens, capables de classer les pages d'un ouvrage numérisé en fonction de plusieurs critères, notamment la structure des mises en page et/ou les caractéristiques typographiques/graphiques du contenu de ces pages. Ainsi, dans le cadre de cette thèse, nous proposons une approche permettant la caractérisation et la catégorisation automatiques des pages d'un ouvrage ancien. L'approche proposée se veut indépendante de la structure et du contenu de l'ouvrage analysé. Le principal avantage de ce travail réside dans le fait que l'approche s'affranchit des connaissances préalables, que ce soit concernant le contenu du document ou sa structure. Elle est basée sur une analyse des descripteurs de texture et une représentation structurelle en graphe afin de fournir une description riche permettant une catégorisation à partir du contenu graphique (capturé par la texture) et des mises en page (représentées par des graphes). En effet, cette catégorisation s'appuie sur la caractérisation du contenu de la page numérisée à l'aide d'une analyse des descripteurs de texture, de forme, géométriques et topologiques. Cette caractérisation est définie à l'aide d'une représentation structurelle. Dans le détail, l'approche de catégorisation se décompose en deux étapes principales successives. La première consiste à extraire des régions homogènes. La seconde vise à proposer une signature structurelle à base de texture, sous la forme d'un graphe, construite à partir des régions homogènes extraites et reflétant la structure de la page analysée. Cette signature assure la mise en œuvre de nombreuses applications pour gérer efficacement un corpus ou des collections de livres patrimoniaux (par exemple, la recherche d'information dans les bibliothèques numériques en fonction de plusieurs critères, ou la catégorisation des pages d'un même ouvrage). En comparant les différentes signatures structurelles par le biais de la distance d'édition entre graphes, les similitudes entre les pages d'un même ouvrage en termes de leurs mises en page et/ou contenus peuvent être déduites. Ainsi de suite, les pages ayant des mises en page et/ou contenus similaires peuvent être catégorisées, et un résumé/une table des matières de l'ouvrage analysé peut être alors généré automatiquement. Pour illustrer l'efficacité de la signature proposée, une étude expérimentale détaillée a été menée dans ce travail pour évaluer deux applications possibles de catégorisation de pages d'un même ouvrage, la classification non supervisée de pages et la segmentation de flux de pages d'un même ouvrage. En outre, les différentes étapes de l'approche proposée ont donné lieu à des évaluations par le biais d'expérimentations menées sur un large corpus de documents patrimoniaux