User-driven Page Layout Analysis of historical printed Books

International audienceIn this paper, based on the study of the specificity of historical printed books, we first explain the main error sources in classical methods used for page layout analysis. We show that each method (bottom-up and top-down) provides different types of useful information that should not be ignored, if we want to obtain both a generic method and good segmentation results. Next, we propose to use a hybrid segmentation algorithm that builds two maps: a shape map that focuses on connected components and a background map, which provides information about white areas corresponding to block separations in the page. Using this first segmentation, a classification of the extracted blocks can be achieved according to scenarios produced by the user. These scenarios are defined very simply during an interactive stage. The user is able to make processing sequences adapted to the different kinds of images he is likely to meet and according to the user needs. The proposed “user-driven approach” is capable of doing segmentation and labelling of the required user high level concepts efficiently and has achieved above 93% accurate results over different data sets tested. User feedbacks and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of our framework mainly because the extraction rules can be defined without difficulty and parameters are not sensitive to page layout variation

Document segmentation using Relative Location Features

[ES] Presentamos un método genérico para análisis de layout ideado para trabajar sobre documentos con layouts Manhattan y no-Manhattan. Proponemos la combinación de Relative Location Features junto con características de textura para codificar las relaciones entre las diferentes clases de entidades. Usando estas características construimos un Conditional Random Field que nos permite estimar el mejor etiquetado en términos de minimización de energía. Los experimentos realizados sobre ambos tipos de documentos demuestran que la utilización de Relative Location Features ayuda a mejorar los resultados de la segmentación en documentos altamente estructurados, así como ofrecer resultados a la altura del estado del arte sobre documentos sin una estructura aparente.[EN] We present a generic layout analysis method devised to work in documents with both Manhattan and non-Mahnattan layouts. We propose to use Relative Location features combined with texture features to encode the relationships between the different class entities. Using these features we build a Conditional Random Field framework that allow us to obtain the best class configuration of an image in terms of energy minimization. The conducted experiments with Manhattan and non-Manhattan layouts prove that using Relative Location Features improves the segmentation results on highly structured documents, as well as results up to the state of the art on documents weakly structured.Cruz Fernández, F. (2012). Document segmentation using Relative Location Features. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/19219Archivo delegad

Use of computer-based rule systems in graphic design

Thesis (M.S.V.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1986.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH.Bibliography: leaves 125-130.Timothy E. Shea.M.S.V.S

Consumer Power to Change the Food System? A Critical Reading of Food Labels as Governance Spaces: The Case of Acai Berry Superfoods

This article argues that the marketing claims on food labels are a governance space worthy of critical examination. We use a case study of superfood açaí berry products to illustrate how marketing claims on food labels encapsulate dominant neoliberal constructions of global food systems. These marketing claims implicitly promise that by making careful choices consumers can resist and redress the ravages of unbridled global capitalism. Food labels suggest that consumers can use market signals to simultaneously govern our own selves and the market to ensure sustainable, fair, and healthy consumption. In response, this article develops, justifies and applies a socio-legal approach to researching food chain governance which uses the food label as its unit of analysis and traces from the micro level of what the everyday consumer is exposed to on a food label to the broader governance processes that the food label both symbolizes and effects. We demonstrate our approach through a “label and chain governance analysis” of açaí berry marketing claims to deconstruct both the regulatory governance of the chain behind the food choices available to the consumer evident from the label and the way in which labels seek to govern consumer choices. Our analysis unpacks the nutritionist, primitivist undertones to the health claims made on these products, the neo-colonial and racist dimensions in their claims regarding fair trade and rural socio-economic development, and, the use of green-washing claims about biodiversity conservation and ecological sustainability. Through our application of this approach to the case study of açaí berry product labels, we show how food labels can legitimize the market-based governance of globalized food chains and misleadingly suggest that capitalist production can be adequately restrained by self-regulation, market-based governance and reflexive consumer choices alone. We conclude by suggesting the need for both greater deconstruction of the governance assumptions behind food labels and to possibilities for collective, public interest oriented regulatory governance of both labelling and the food system

The essential line: John Flaxman and neoplatonism in early nineteenth-century manufactures

This is an accepted manuscript of a book chapter published in Visual Rhetoric and the Eloquence of Design. Ed. Leslie Atzmon, © 2011 by Parlor Press. Used by Permission. All rights reserved. https://parlorpress.com The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.This essay explores the work of John Flaxman, a British sculptor of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries, whose work ranged from that of a fine artist to a designer for manufactures. Flaxman was most famous as a sculptor and modeller at the end of his life, but he also worked in two-dimensions, indeed the international recognition he received early on in his career was established by the publication of several editions of illustrations.1 These folios were drawings derived from Classical works, as well as the writings of Dante, and it is his graphic translation of the Homeric poems of the Odyssey and Iliad (1793), that I shall be focussing on here. However, rather than separating Flaxman’s graphic design from both his fine art and industrial sculpture, this essay will explore the relationship between his activities in two- and three-dimensions, and consider how Flaxman’s understanding of both fine art sculpture and modelling within an industrial context, may have been instrumental in the construction, and an audience’s subsequent ‘reading’, of his graphic works

Transforming structured descriptions to visual representations. An automated visualization of historical bookbinding structures.

In cultural heritage, the documentation of artefacts can be both iconographic and textual, i.e. both pictures and drawings on the one hand, and text and words on the other are used for documentation purposes. This research project aims to produce a methodology to transform automatically verbal descriptions of material objects, with a focus on bookbinding structures, into standardized and scholarly-sound visual representations. In the last few decades, the recording and management of documentation data about material objects, including bookbindings, has switched from paper-based archives to databases, but sketches and diagrams are a form of documentation still carried out mostly by hand. Diagrams hold some unique information, but often, also redundant information already secured through verbal means within the databases. This project proposes a methodology to harness verbal information stored within a database and automatically generate visual representations. A number of projects within the cultural heritage sector have applied semantic modelling to generate graphic outputs from verbal inputs. None of these has considered bookbindings and none of these relies on information already recorded within databases. Instead they develop an extra layer of modelling and typically gather more data, specifically for the purpose of generating a pictorial output. In these projects qualitative data (verbal input) is often mixed with quantitative data (measurements, scans, or other direct acquisition methods) to solve the problems of indeterminateness found in verbal descriptions. Also, none of these projects has attempted to develop a general methodology to ascertain the minimum amount ii of information that is required for successful verbal-to-visual transformations for material objects in other fields. This research has addressed these issues. The novel contributions of this research include: (i) a series of methodological recommendations for successful automated verbal-to-visual intersemiotic translations for material objects — and bookbinding structures in particular — which are possible when whole/part relationships, spatial configurations, the object’s logical form, and its prototypical shapes are communicated; (ii) the production of intersemiotic transformations for the domain of bookbinding structures; (iii) design recommendations for the generation of standardized automated prototypical drawings of bookbinding structures; (iv) the application — never considered before — of uncertainty visualization to the field of the archaeology of the book. This research also proposes the use of automatically generated diagrams as data verification tools to help identify meaningless or wrong data, thus increasing data accuracy within databases