End-Shape Analysis for Automatic Segmentation of Arabic Handwritten Texts

Word segmentation is an important task for many methods that are related to document understanding especially word spotting and word recognition. Several approaches of word segmentation have been proposed for Latin-based languages while a few of them have been introduced for Arabic texts. The fact that Arabic writing is cursive by nature and unconstrained with no clear boundaries between the words makes the processing of Arabic handwritten text a more challenging problem. In this thesis, the design and implementation of an End-Shape Letter (ESL) based segmentation system for Arabic handwritten text is presented. This incorporates four novel aspects: (i) removal of secondary components, (ii) baseline estimation, (iii) ESL recognition, and (iv) the creation of a new off-line CENPARMI ESL database. Arabic texts include small connected components, also called secondary components. Removing these components can improve the performance of several systems such as baseline estimation. Thus, a robust method to remove secondary components that takes into consideration the challenges in the Arabic handwriting is introduced. The methods reconstruct the image based on some criteria. The results of this method were subsequently compared with those of two other methods that used the same database. The results show that the proposed method is effective. Baseline estimation is a challenging task for Arabic texts since it includes ligature, overlapping, and secondary components. Therefore, we propose a learning-based approach that addresses these challenges. Our method analyzes the image and extracts baseline dependent features. Then, the baseline is estimated using a classifier. Algorithms dealing with text segmentation usually analyze the gaps between connected components. These algorithms are based on metric calculation, finding threshold, and/or gap classification. We use two well-known metrics: bounding box and convex hull to test metric-based method on Arabic handwritten texts, and to include this technique in our approach. To determine the threshold, an unsupervised learning approach, known as the Gaussian Mixture Model, is used. Our ESL-based segmentation approach extracts the final letter of a word using rule-based technique and recognizes these letters using the implemented ESL classifier. To demonstrate the benefit of text segmentation, a holistic word spotting system is implemented. For this system, a word recognition system is implemented. A series of experiments with different sets of features are conducted. The system shows promising results

A novel image matching approach for word spotting

Word spotting has been adopted and used by various researchers as a complementary technique to Optical Character Recognition for document analysis and retrieval. The various applications of word spotting include document indexing, image retrieval and information filtering. The important factors in word spotting techniques are pre-processing, selection and extraction of proper features and image matching algorithms. The Correlation Similarity Measure (CORR) algorithm is considered to be a faster matching algorithm, originally defined for finding similarities between binary patterns. In the word spotting literature the CORR algorithm has been used successfully to compare the GSC binary features extracted from binary word images, i.e., Gradient, Structural and Concavity (GSC) features. However, the problem with this approach is that binarization of images leads to a loss of very useful information. Furthermore, before extracting GSC binary features the word images must be skew corrected and slant normalized, which is not only difficult but in some cases impossible in Arabic and modified Arabic scripts. We present a new approach in which the Correlation Similarity Measure (CORR) algorithm has been used innovatively to compare Gray-scale word images. In this approach, binarization of images, skew correction and slant normalization of word images are not required at all. The various features, i.e., projection profiles, word profiles and transitional features are extracted from the Gray-scale word images and converted into their binary equivalents, which are compared via CORR algorithm with greater speed and higher accuracy. The experiments have been conducted on Gray-scale versions of newly created handwritten databases of Pashto and Dari languages, written in modified Arabic scripts. For each of these languages we have used 4599 words relating to 21 different word classes collected from 219 writers. The average precision rates achieved for Pashto and Dari languages were 93.18 % and 93.75 %, respectively. The time taken for matching a pair of images was 1.43 milli-seconds. In addition, we will present the handwritten databases for two well-known Indo- Iranian languages, i.e., Pashto and Dari languages. These are large databases which contain six types of data, i.e., Dates, Isolated Digits, Numeral Strings, Isolated Characters, Different Words and Special Symbols, written by native speakers of the corresponding languages

Drawing, Handwriting Processing Analysis: New Advances and Challenges

International audienceDrawing and handwriting are communicational skills that are fundamental in geopolitical, ideological and technological evolutions of all time. drawingand handwriting are still useful in defining innovative applications in numerous fields. In this regard, researchers have to solve new problems like those related to the manner in which drawing and handwriting become an efficient way to command various connected objects; or to validate graphomotor skills as evident and objective sources of data useful in the study of human beings, their capabilities and their limits from birth to decline

Salford postgraduate annual research conference (SPARC) 2012 proceedings

These proceedings bring together a selection of papers from the 2012 Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference (SPARC). They reflect the breadth and diversity of research interests showcased at the conference, at which over 130 researchers from Salford, the North West and other UK universities presented their work. 21 papers are collated here from the humanities, arts, social sciences, health, engineering, environment and life sciences, built environment and business

Electronic Evidence and Electronic Signatures

In this updated edition of the well-established practitioner text, Stephen Mason and Daniel Seng have brought together a team of experts in the field to provide an exhaustive treatment of electronic evidence and electronic signatures. This fifth edition continues to follow the tradition in English evidence text books by basing the text on the law of England and Wales, with appropriate citations of relevant case law and legislation from other jurisdictions. Stephen Mason (of the Middle Temple, Barrister) is a leading authority on electronic evidence and electronic signatures, having advised global corporations and governments on these topics. He is also the editor of International Electronic Evidence (British Institute of International and Comparative Law 2008), and he founded the innovative international open access journal Digital Evidence and Electronic Signatures Law Review in 2004. Daniel Seng (Associate Professor, National University of Singapore) is the Director of the Centre for Technology, Robotics, AI and the Law (TRAIL). He teaches and researches information technology law and evidence law. Daniel was previously a partner and head of the technology practice at Messrs Rajah & Tann. He is also an active consultant to the World Intellectual Property Organization, where he has researched, delivered papers and published monographs on copyright exceptions for academic institutions, music copyright in the Asia Pacific and the liability of Internet intermediaries

The Contest for Aboriginal Souls

"This book covers the missionary activity in Australia conducted by non-English speaking missionaries from Catholic and Protestant mission societies from its beginnings to the end of the mission era. It looks through the eyes of the missionaries and their helpers, as well as incorporating Indigenous perspectives and offering a balanced assessment of missionary endeavour in Australia, attuned to the controversies that surround mission history. It means neither to condemn nor praise, but rather to understand the various responses of Indigenous communities, the intentions of missionaries, the agendas of the mission societies and the many tensions besetting the mission endeavour. It explores a common commitment to the supernatural and the role of intermediaries like local diplomats and evangelists from the Pacific Islands and Philippines, and emphasises the strong role played by non-English speakers in the transcultural Australian mission effort. This book is a companion to the website German Missionaries in Australia – A web-directory of intercultural encounters. The web-directory provides detailed accounts of Australian missions staffed with German speakers. The book reads laterally across the different missions and produces a completely different type of knowledge about missions. The book and its accompanying website are based on a decade of research ranging across mission archives with foreign-language sources that have not previously been accessed for a historiography of Australian missions. ‘A remarkable intellectual achievement, compelling reading.’ — Dr Niel Gunson ‘The range of knowledge on display here is very impressive indeed.’ — Professor Peter Monteath

Diamonds are Forever: A Decolonizing, Feminist Approach to Diamond Mining in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories

This dissertation examines the impact of the development of diamond mines in the Yellowknife region, Northwest Territories (NWT), asking two questions: how has the diamond-mining regime affected the gendered social relations in the regional racialized mixed economy? And, how can violence against Indigenous women living in the region be situated in the context of structural shifts in the mixed economy? The analysis developed in response to these questions is informed by a theorization of the mixed economy as a dynamic set of social relations characterized by tension between the temporal imperatives of capitalist production and the place-based imperatives of subsistence. Taking a decolonizing, feminist political economy (FPE) approach, this dissertation responded to these questions by drawing on documentary analysis, interviews, and talking circles to examine the often invisibilized labour performed by Indigenous women that reproduces the mixed economy. The central contention is that the diamond-mining regime represents a new imposition upon daily and intergenerational social reproduction performed by Indigenous women, an imposition that is sometimes violent, and that is met with resistance. The dissertation unfolds in six substantive chapters. Building on a theoretical and historical grounding offered in chapters one and two, chapters three-five draw on field research to examine shifts in local relations of capitalist production, social reproduction, and subsistence production. The analysis reveals that the Fly-In-Fly-Out (FIFO) diamond-mining regime, itself a spatial articulation of the capitalist separation between (masculinized) capitalist production and (feminized) social reproduction, introduces, or, in some cases, intensifies a nuclear male-breadwinner/female-caregiver structure. Woven through this analysis is an examination of the relationship between structural and embodied violence. Indeed, the structural shifts imposed by the diamond-mining regime characterized in this dissertation as structural violence contribute to Indigenous womens experiences of embodied violence in the Yellowknife region. At the same time, Indigenous women meet these shifts with decolonizing resistance in the form of the day-to-day labours they perform to reproduce the place-based social relations of the mixed economy