49 research outputs found
Unsupervised Adaptation for Synthetic-to-Real Handwritten Word Recognition
Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is still a challenging problem because it
must deal with two important difficulties: the variability among writing
styles, and the scarcity of labelled data. To alleviate such problems,
synthetic data generation and data augmentation are typically used to train HTR
systems. However, training with such data produces encouraging but still
inaccurate transcriptions in real words. In this paper, we propose an
unsupervised writer adaptation approach that is able to automatically adjust a
generic handwritten word recognizer, fully trained with synthetic fonts,
towards a new incoming writer. We have experimentally validated our proposal
using five different datasets, covering several challenges (i) the document
source: modern and historic samples, which may involve paper degradation
problems; (ii) different handwriting styles: single and multiple writer
collections; and (iii) language, which involves different character
combinations. Across these challenging collections, we show that our system is
able to maintain its performance, thus, it provides a practical and generic
approach to deal with new document collections without requiring any expensive
and tedious manual annotation step.Comment: Accepted to WACV 202
Handwritten Word Spotting with Corrected Attributes
International audienceWe propose an approach to multi-writer word spotting, where the goal is to find a query word in a dataset comprised of document images. We propose an attributes-based approach that leads to a low-dimensional, fixed-length representation of the word images that is fast to compute and, especially, fast to compare. This approach naturally leads to an unified representation of word images and strings, which seamlessly allows one to indistinctly perform query-by-example, where the query is an image, and query-by-string, where the query is a string. We also propose a calibration scheme to correct the attributes scores based on Canonical Correlation Analysis that greatly improves the results on a challenging dataset. We test our approach on two public datasets showing state-of-the-art results
Joint Recognition of Handwritten Text and Named Entities with a Neural End-to-end Model
When extracting information from handwritten documents, text transcription
and named entity recognition are usually faced as separate subsequent tasks.
This has the disadvantage that errors in the first module affect heavily the
performance of the second module. In this work we propose to do both tasks
jointly, using a single neural network with a common architecture used for
plain text recognition. Experimentally, the work has been tested on a
collection of historical marriage records. Results of experiments are presented
to show the effect on the performance for different configurations: different
ways of encoding the information, doing or not transfer learning and processing
at text line or multi-line region level. The results are comparable to state of
the art reported in the ICDAR 2017 Information Extraction competition, even
though the proposed technique does not use any dictionaries, language modeling
or post processing.Comment: To appear in IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems
2018 (DAS 2018