Two Methods to Improve Confidence Scores for Lexicon-Free Word Spotting in Handwritten Text

© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[EN] Two methods are presented to improve word confidence scores for Line-Level Query-by-String Lexicon-Free Keyword Spotting (KWS) in handwritten text images. The first one approaches true relevance probabilities by means of computations directly carried out on character lattices obtained from the lines images considered. The second method uses the same character lattices, but it obtains relevance scores by first computing frame-level character sequence scores which resemble the word posteriorgrams used in previous approaches for lexicon-based KWS. The first method results from a formal probabilistic derivation, which allow us to better understand and further develop the underlying ideas. The second one is less formal but, according with experiments presented in the paper, it obtains almost identical results with much lower computational cost. Moreover, in contrast with the first method, the second one allows to directly obtain accurate bounding boxes for the spotted words.This work was partially supported by the Spanish MEC under FPU grant FPU13/06281, by the Generalitat Valenciana under the Prometeo/2009/014 project grant ALMAMATER, and through the EU projects: HIMANIS (JPICH programme, Spanish grant Ref. PCIN-2015-068) and READ (Horizon-2020 programme, grant Ref. 674943).Toselli, AH.; Puigcerver, J.; Vidal, E. (2016). Two Methods to Improve Confidence Scores for Lexicon-Free Word Spotting in Handwritten Text. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICFHR.2016.0072

HMM word graph based keyword spotting in handwritten document images

[EN] Line-level keyword spotting (KWS) is presented on the basis of frame-level word posterior probabilities. These posteriors are obtained using word graphs derived from the recogni- tion process of a full-fledged handwritten text recognizer based on hidden Markov models and N-gram language models. This approach has several advantages. First, since it uses a holistic, segmentation-free technology, it does not require any kind of word or charac- ter segmentation. Second, the use of language models allows the context of each spotted word to be taken into account, thereby considerably increasing KWS accuracy. And third, the proposed KWS scores are based on true posterior probabilities, taking into account all (or most) possible word segmentations of the input image. These scores are properly bounded and normalized. This mathematically clean formulation lends itself to smooth, threshold-based keyword queries which, in turn, permit comfortable trade-offs between search precision and recall. Experiments are carried out on several historic collections of handwritten text images, as well as a well-known data set of modern English handwrit- ten text. According to the empirical results, the proposed approach achieves KWS results comparable to those obtained with the recently-introduced "BLSTM neural networks KWS" approach and clearly outperform the popular, state-of-the-art "Filler HMM" KWS method. Overall, the results clearly support all the above-claimed advantages of the proposed ap- proach.This work has been partially supported by the Generalitat Valenciana under the Prometeo/2009/014 project grant ALMA-MATER, and through the EU projects: HIMANIS (JPICH programme, Spanish grant Ref. PCIN-2015-068) and READ (Horizon 2020 programme, grant Ref. 674943).Toselli, AH.; Vidal, E.; Romero, V.; Frinken, V. (2016). HMM word graph based keyword spotting in handwritten document images. Information Sciences. 370:497-518. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2016.07.063S49751837

Fused Text Recogniser and Deep Embeddings Improve Word Recognition and Retrieval

Recognition and retrieval of textual content from the large document collections have been a powerful use case for the document image analysis community. Often the word is the basic unit for recognition as well as retrieval. Systems that rely only on the text recogniser (OCR) output are not robust enough in many situations, especially when the word recognition rates are poor, as in the case of historic documents or digital libraries. An alternative has been word spotting based methods that retrieve/match words based on a holistic representation of the word. In this paper, we fuse the noisy output of text recogniser with a deep embeddings representation derived out of the entire word. We use average and max fusion for improving the ranked results in the case of retrieval. We validate our methods on a collection of Hindi documents. We improve word recognition rate by 1.4 and retrieval by 11.13 in the mAP.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, Accepted in IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS) 2020, "Visit project page, at http://cvit.iiit.ac.in/research/projects/cvit-projects/fused-text-recogniser-and-deep-embeddings-improve-word-recognition-and-retrieval

Querying out-of-vocabulary words in lexicon-based keyword spotting

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00521-016-2197-8[EN] Lexicon-based handwritten text keyword spotting (KWS) has proven to be a faster and more accurate alternative to lexicon-free methods. Nevertheless, since lexicon-based KWS relies on a predefined vocabulary, fixed in the training phase, it does not support queries involving out-of-vocabulary (OOV) keywords. In this paper, we outline previous work aimed at solving this problem and present a new approach based on smoothing the (null) scores of OOV keywords by means of the information provided by ``similar'' in-vocabulary words. Good results achieved using this approach are compared with previously published alternatives on different data sets.This work was partially supported by the Spanish MEC under FPU Grant FPU13/06281, by the Generalitat Valenciana under the Prometeo/2009/014 Project Grant ALMA-MATER, and through the EU Projects: HIMANIS (JPICH programme, Spanish grant Ref. PCIN-2015-068) and READ (Horizon-2020 programme, grant Ref. 674943).Puigcerver, J.; Toselli, AH.; Vidal, E. (2016). Querying out-of-vocabulary words in lexicon-based keyword spotting. Neural Computing and Applications. 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-016-2197-8S110Almazan J, Gordo A, Fornes A, Valveny E (2013) Handwritten word spotting with corrected attributes. In: 2013 IEEE international conference on computer vision (ICCV), pp 1017–1024. doi: 10.1109/ICCV.2013.130Amengual JC, Vidal E (2000) On the estimation of error-correcting parameters. In: Proceedings 15th international conference on pattern recognition, 2000, vol 2, pp 883–886Fernández D, Lladós J, Fornés A (2011) Handwritten word spotting in old manuscript images using a pseudo-structural descriptor organized in a hash structure. In: Vitri'a J, Sanches JM, Hern'andez M (eds) Pattern recognition and image analysis: Proceedings of 5th Iberian Conference, IbPRIA 2011, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, June 8–10. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 628–635. doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-21257-4_78Fischer A, Keller A, Frinken V, Bunke H (2012) Lexicon-free handwritten word spotting using character HMMs. Pattern Recognit Lett 33(7):934–942. doi: 10.1016/j.patrec.2011.09.009 Special Issue on Awards from ICPR 2010Fornés A, Frinken V, Fischer A, Almazán J, Jackson G, Bunke H (2011) A keyword spotting approach using blurred shape model-based descriptors. In: Proceedings of the 2011 workshop on historical document imaging and processing, pp 83–90. ACMFrinken V, Fischer A, Manmatha R, Bunke H (2012) A novel word spotting method based on recurrent neural networks. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 34(2):211–224. doi: 10.1109/TPAMI.2011.113Gatos B, Pratikakis I (2009) Segmentation-free word spotting in historical printed documents. In: 10th International conference on document analysis and recognition, 2009. ICDAR’09, pp 271–275. IEEEJelinek F (1998) Statistical methods for speech recognition. 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In: 7th Iberian conference on pattern recognition and image analysis. SpringerRath T, Manmatha R (2007) Word spotting for historical documents. Int J Doc Anal Recognit 9:139–152Robertson S. (2008) A new interpretation of average precision. In: Proceedings of the international. ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval (SIGIR ’08), pp 689–690. ACM, New York, NY, USA. doi: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1390334.1390453Rodriguez-Serrano JA, Perronnin F (2009) Handwritten word-spotting using hidden markov models and universal vocabularies. Pattern Recognit 42(9):2106–2116. doi: 10.1016/j.patcog.2009.02.005 . http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031320309000673Rusinol M, Aldavert D, Toledo R, Llados J (2011) Browsing heterogeneous document collections by a segmentation-free word spotting method. 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Word graphs size impact on the performance of handwriting document applications

[EN] Two document processing applications are con- sidered: computer-assisted transcription of text images (CATTI) and Keyword Spotting (KWS), for transcribing and indexing handwritten documents, respectively. Instead of working directly on the handwriting images, both of them employ meta-data structures called word graphs (WG), which are obtained using segmentation-free hand- written text recognition technology based on N-gram lan- guage models and hidden Markov models. A WG contains most of the relevant information of the original text (line) image required by CATTI and KWS but, if it is too large, the computational cost of generating and using it can become unafordable. Conversely, if it is too small, relevant information may be lost, leading to a reduction of CATTI or KWS performance. We study the trade-off between WG size and performance in terms of effectiveness and effi- ciency of CATTI and KWS. Results show that small, computationally cheap WGs can be used without loosing the excellent CATTI and KWS performance achieved with huge WGs.Work partially supported by the Generalitat Valenciana under the Prometeo/2009/014 Project Grant ALMAMATER, by the Spanish MECD as part of the Valorization and I+D+I Resources program of VLC/CAMPUS in the International Excellence Campus program, and through the EU projects: HIMANIS (JPICH programme, Spanish Grant Ref. PCIN-2015-068) and READ (Horizon-2020 programme, Grant Ref. 674943).Toselli ., AH.; Romero Gómez, V.; Vidal, E. (2017). Word graphs size impact on the performance of handwriting document applications. Neural Computing and Applications. 28(9):2477-2487. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-016-2336-2S24772487289Amengual JC, Vidal E (1998) Efficient error-correcting Viterbi parsing. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 20(10):1109–1116Bazzi I, Schwartz R, Makhoul J (1999) An omnifont open-vocabulary OCR system for English and Arabic. 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Design of an Offline Handwriting Recognition System Tested on the Bangla and Korean Scripts

This dissertation presents a flexible and robust offline handwriting recognition system which is tested on the Bangla and Korean scripts. Offline handwriting recognition is one of the most challenging and yet to be solved problems in machine learning. While a few popular scripts (like Latin) have received a lot of attention, many other widely used scripts (like Bangla) have seen very little progress. Features such as connectedness and vowels structured as diacritics make it a challenging script to recognize. A simple and robust design for offline recognition is presented which not only works reliably, but also can be used for almost any alphabetic writing system. The framework has been rigorously tested for Bangla and demonstrated how it can be transformed to apply to other scripts through experiments on the Korean script whose two-dimensional arrangement of characters makes it a challenge to recognize. The base of this design is a character spotting network which detects the location of different script elements (such as characters, diacritics) from an unsegmented word image. A transcript is formed from the detected classes based on their corresponding location information. This is the first reported lexicon-free offline recognition system for Bangla and achieves a Character Recognition Accuracy (CRA) of 94.8%. This is also one of the most flexible architectures ever presented. Recognition of Korean was achieved with a 91.2% CRA. Also, a powerful technique of autonomous tagging was developed which can drastically reduce the effort of preparing a dataset for any script. The combination of the character spotting method and the autonomous tagging brings the entire offline recognition problem very close to a singular solution. Additionally, a database named the Boise State Bangla Handwriting Dataset was developed. This is one of the richest offline datasets currently available for Bangla and this has been made publicly accessible to accelerate the research progress. Many other tools were developed and experiments were conducted to more rigorously validate this framework by evaluating the method against external datasets (CMATERdb 1.1.1, Indic Word Dataset and REID2019: Early Indian Printed Documents). Offline handwriting recognition is an extremely promising technology and the outcome of this research moves the field significantly ahead