35 research outputs found
Unsupervised ensemble of experts (EoE) framework for automatic binarization of document images
In recent years, a large number of binarization methods have been developed,
with varying performance generalization and strength against different
benchmarks. In this work, to leverage on these methods, an ensemble of experts
(EoE) framework is introduced, to efficiently combine the outputs of various
methods. The proposed framework offers a new selection process of the
binarization methods, which are actually the experts in the ensemble, by
introducing three concepts: confidentness, endorsement and schools of experts.
The framework, which is highly objective, is built based on two general
principles: (i) consolidation of saturated opinions and (ii) identification of
schools of experts. After building the endorsement graph of the ensemble for an
input document image based on the confidentness of the experts, the saturated
opinions are consolidated, and then the schools of experts are identified by
thresholding the consolidated endorsement graph. A variation of the framework,
in which no selection is made, is also introduced that combines the outputs of
all experts using endorsement-dependent weights. The EoE framework is evaluated
on the set of participating methods in the H-DIBCO'12 contest and also on an
ensemble generated from various instances of grid-based Sauvola method with
promising performance.Comment: 6-page version, Accepted to be presented in ICDAR'1
A Multiple-Expert Binarization Framework for Multispectral Images
In this work, a multiple-expert binarization framework for multispectral
images is proposed. The framework is based on a constrained subspace selection
limited to the spectral bands combined with state-of-the-art gray-level
binarization methods. The framework uses a binarization wrapper to enhance the
performance of the gray-level binarization. Nonlinear preprocessing of the
individual spectral bands is used to enhance the textual information. An
evolutionary optimizer is considered to obtain the optimal and some suboptimal
3-band subspaces from which an ensemble of experts is then formed. The
framework is applied to a ground truth multispectral dataset with promising
results. In addition, a generalization to the cross-validation approach is
developed that not only evaluates generalizability of the framework, it also
provides a practical instance of the selected experts that could be then
applied to unseen inputs despite the small size of the given ground truth
dataset.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, 6 tables. Presented at ICDAR'1