On-the-fly Historical Handwritten Text Annotation

The performance of information retrieval algorithms depends upon the availability of ground truth labels annotated by experts. This is an important prerequisite, and difficulties arise when the annotated ground truth labels are incorrect or incomplete due to high levels of degradation. To address this problem, this paper presents a simple method to perform on-the-fly annotation of degraded historical handwritten text in ancient manuscripts. The proposed method aims at quick generation of ground truth and correction of inaccurate annotations such that the bounding box perfectly encapsulates the word, and contains no added noise from the background or surroundings. This method will potentially be of help to historians and researchers in generating and correcting word labels in a document dynamically. The effectiveness of the annotation method is empirically evaluated on an archival manuscript collection from well-known publicly available datasets

Math Search for the Masses: Multimodal Search Interfaces and Appearance-Based Retrieval

We summarize math search engines and search interfaces produced by the Document and Pattern Recognition Lab in recent years, and in particular the min math search interface and the Tangent search engine. Source code for both systems are publicly available. "The Masses" refers to our emphasis on creating systems for mathematical non-experts, who may be looking to define unfamiliar notation, or browse documents based on the visual appearance of formulae rather than their mathematical semantics.Comment: Paper for Invited Talk at 2015 Conference on Intelligent Computer Mathematics (July, Washington DC