An investigation of novel combined features for a handwritten short answer assessment system

© 2016 IEEE. This paper proposes an off-line automatic assessment system utilising novel combined feature extraction techniques. The proposed feature extraction techniques are 1) the proposed Water Reservoir, Loop, Modified Direction and Gaussian Grid Feature (WRL-MDGGF), 2) the proposed Gravity, Water Reservoir, Loop, Modified Direction and Gaussian Grid Feature (G-WRL-MDGGF). The proposed feature extraction techniques together with their original features and other combined feature extraction techniques were employed in an investigation of the efficiency of feature extraction techniques on an automatic off-line short answer assessment system. The proposed system utilised two classifiers namely, artificial neural networks and Support Vector Machines (SVMs), two type of datasets and two different thresholds in this investigation. Promising recognition rates of 94.85% and 94.88% were obtained when the proposed WRL-MDGGF and G-WRL-MDGGF were employed, respectively, using SVMs

ICFHR 2020 Competition on Short answer ASsessment and Thai student SIGnature and Name COMponents Recognition and Verification (SASIGCOM 2020)

This paper describes the results of the competition on Short answer ASsessment and Thai student SIGnature and Name COMponents Recognition and Verification (SASIGCOM 2020) in conjunction with the 17th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR 2020). The competition was aimed to automate the evaluation process short answer-based examination and record the development and gain attention to such system. The proposed competition contains three elements which are short answer assessment (recognition and marking the answers to short-answer questions derived from examination papers), student name components (first and last names) and signature verification and recognition. Signatures and name components data were collected from 100 volunteers. For the Thai signature dataset, there are 30 genuine signatures, 12 skilled and 12 simple forgeries for each writer. With Thai name components dataset, there are 30 genuine and 12 skilfully forged name components for each writer. There are 104 exam papers in the short answer assessment dataset, 52 of which were written with cursive handwriting; the rest of 52 papers were written with printed handwriting. The exam papers contain ten questions, and the answers to the questions were designed to be a few words per question. Three teams from distinguished labs submitted their systems. For short answer assessment, word spotting task was also performed. This paper analysed the results produced by their algorithms using a performance measure and defines a way forward for this subject of research. Both the datasets, along with some of the accompanying ground truth/baseline mask will be made freely available for research purposes via the TC10/TC11

Off-line restricted-set handwritten word recognition for student identification in a short answer question automated assessment system

Handwriting recognition is one of the most intensive areas of study in the field of pattern recognition. Many applications are able to benefit from a robust off-line handwriting recognition technique. An automatic off-line assessment system and a writer identification system are two of those applications. Off-line automatic assessment systems can be an aid for teachers in the marking process; they can reduce the time consumed by the human marker. There has only been limited work undertaken in developing off-line automatic assessment systems using handwriting recognition, and none in developing student identification systems, even though such systems would clearly benefit the education sector. In order to develop a complete off-line automatic assessment system, student identification using full student names is proposed in this paper. The Gaussian Grid and Modified Direction Feature Extraction Techniques are investigated in order to develop the proposed system. The recognition rates achieved using both techniques are encouraging (up to 99.08% for the Modified Direction feature extraction technique, and up to 98.28% for the Gaussian Grid feature extraction technique. © 2012 IEEE

ICFHR 2018 Competition on Thai student signatures and name components recognition and verification (TSNCRV2018)

© 2018 IEEE. This paper summarises the results of the competition on the 1st Thai Student Signature and Name Components Recognition and Verification (TSNCRV 2018). It was organised in the context of the 16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR 2018). The aim of this competition was to record the development and gain attention on Thai student signatures and name component recognition and verification. Two different types of datasets were used for the competition: The first dataset contains Thai student signatures and the second dataset contains Thai student name components. Signatures and name components from 100 volunteers each were included in the competition datasets. For Thai signature dataset, there are 30 genuine signatures, 12 skilled and 12 simple forgeries for each writer. For Thai name components, there are 30 genuine and 12 skilfully forged name components for each writer. For both the datasets the individuals were asked to write their name/signature in the given space on a white piece of paper for number of time (with a pause between each 10 samples). The skilled forgers were asked practice emitting the original signature for certain number of times till they fill skilled to forge. Five teams from distinguish labs submitted their systems. This paper analysed the results produced by these algorithms/systems using a performance measure and defined a way forward for this subject of research. Both the datasets along with some of the accompanying ground truth/baseline mask will be made freely available for research purposes via the TC10/TC11

Thai automatic signature verification system employing textural features

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2018. This study focuses on a comprehensive study of Automatic Signature Verification (ASV) for off-line Thai signatures; an investigation was carried out to characterise the challenges in Thai ASV and to baseline the performance of Thai ASV employing baseline features, being Local Binary Pattern, Local Directional Pattern, Local Binary and Directional Patterns combined (LBDP), and the baseline shape/feature-based hidden Markov model. As there was no publicly available Thai signature database found in the literature, the authors have developed and proposed a database considering real-world signatures from Thailand. The authors have also identified their latent challenges and characterised Thai signature-based ASV. The database consists of 5,400 signatures from 100 signers. Thai signatures could be bi-script in nature, considering the fact that a single signature can contain only Thai or Roman characters or contain both Roman and Thai, which poses an interesting challenge for script-independent SV. Therefore, along with the baseline experiments, the investigation on the influence and nature of bi-script ASV was also conducted. From the equal error rates and Bhattacharyya distance, the score achieved in the experiments indicate that the Thai SV scenario is a script-independent problem. The open research area on this subject of research has also been addressed

An automatic student verification system utilising off-line Thai name components

© 2017 IEEE. This research proposed an automatic student identification and verification system utilising off-line Thai name components. The Thai name components consist of first and last names. Dense texture-based feature descriptors were able to yield encouraging results when applied to different handwritten text recognition scenarios. As a result, the authors employed such features in investigating their performance on Thai name component verification system. In this research, Dense-Local Binary Pattern, Dense-Local Directional Pattern, and Local Binary Pattern combined with Local Directional Pattern were employed. A base-line shape/feature i.e. Hidden Markov Model (HMM) was also utilised in this study. As there is no dataset on Thai name verification in the literature, a dataset is proposed for a Thai name verification system. The name component samples were collected from high school students. It consists of 8,400 name components (first and last names) from 100 students. Each student provided 60 genuine name components, and each of the name components was forged by 12 other students. An encouraging result was found employing the above-mentioned features on the proposed dataset