Multi-task Layout Analysis of Handwritten Musical Scores

[EN] Document Layout Analysis (DLA) is a process that must be performed before attempting to recognize the content of handwritten musical scores by a modern automatic or semiautomatic system. DLA should provide the segmentation of the document image into semantically useful region types such as staff, lyrics, etc. In this paper we extend our previous work for DLA of handwritten text documents to also address complex handwritten music scores. This system is able to perform region segmentation, region classification and baseline detection in an integrated manner. Several experiments were performed in two different datasets in order to validate this approach and assess it in different scenarios. Results show high accuracy in such complex manuscripts and very competent computational time, which is a good indicator of the scalability of the method for very large collections.This work was partially supported by the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia under grant FPI-420II/899, a 2017-2018 Digital Humanities research grant of the BBVA Foundation for the project Carabela, the History Of Medieval Europe (HOME) project (Ref.: PCI2018-093122) and through the EU project READ (Horizon-2020 program, grant Ref. 674943). NVIDIA Corporation kindly donated the Titan X GPU used for this research.Quirós, L.; Toselli, AH.; Vidal, E. (2019). Multi-task Layout Analysis of Handwritten Musical Scores. Springer. 123-134. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31321-0_11S123134Burgoyne, J.A., Ouyang, Y., Himmelman, T., Devaney, J., Pugin, L., Fujinaga, I.: Lyric extraction and recognition on digital images of early music sources. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, vol. 10, pp. 723–727 (2009)Calvo-Zaragoza, J., Toselli, A.H., Vidal, E.: Probabilistic music-symbol spotting in handwritten scores. In: 16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR), pp. 558–563, August 2018Calvo-Zaragoza, J., Zhang, K., Saleh, Z., Vigliensoni, G., Fujinaga, I.: Music document layout analysis through machine learning and human feedback. In: 14th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), vol. 02, pp. 23–24, November 2017Calvo-Zaragoza, J., Castellanos, F.J., Vigliensoni, G., Fujinaga, I.: Deep neural networks for document processing of music score images. Appl. Sci. 8(5), 654 (2018). (2076-3417)Calvo-Zaragoza, J., Toselli, A.H., Vidal, E.: Handwritten music recognition for mensural notation: formulation, data and baseline results. In: 14th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), vol. 1, pp. 1081–1086. IEEE (2017)Campos, V.B., Calvo-Zaragoza, J., Toselli, A.H., Ruiz, E.V.: Sheet music statistical layout analysis. In: 15th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR), pp. 313–318. IEEE (2016)Castellanos, F.J., Calvo-Zaragoza, J., Vigliensoni, G., Fujinaga, I.: Document analysis of music score images with selectional auto-encoders. In: 19th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, pp. 256–263 (2018)Grüning, T., Labahn, R., Diem, M., Kleber, F., Fiel, S.: READ-BAD: a new dataset and evaluation scheme for baseline detection in archival documents. CoRR abs/1705.03311 (2017). http://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03311Kingma, D.P., Ba, J.: Adam: a method for stochastic optimization. In: 3rd International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) (2015)Long, J., Shelhamer, E., Darrell, T.: Fully convolutional networks for semantic segmentation. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 3431–3440 (2015)Quirós, L.: Multi-task handwritten document layout analysis. ArXiv e-prints, 1806.08852 (2018). https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.08852Quirós, L., Bosch, V., Serrano, L., Toselli, A.H., Vidal, E.: From HMMs to RNNs: computer-assisted transcription of a handwritten notarial records collection. In: 16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR), pp. 116–121. IEEE, August 2018Rebelo, A., Fujinaga, I., Paszkiewicz, F., Marcal, A.R., Guedes, C., Cardoso, J.S.: Optical music recognition: state-of-the-art and open issues. Int. J. Multimed. Inf. Retrieval 1(3), 173–190 (2012)Sánchez, J.A., Romero, V., Toselli, A.H., Villegas, M., Vidal, E.: ICDAR2017 competition on handwritten text recognition on the READ dataset. In: 14th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), vol. 1, pp. 1383–1388. IEEE (2017)Suzuki, S., et al.: Topological structural analysis of digitized binary images by border following. Comput. Vis. Graph. Image Process. 30(1), 32–46 (1985

Two Methods to Improve Confidence Scores for Lexicon-Free Word Spotting in Handwritten Text

© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[EN] Two methods are presented to improve word confidence scores for Line-Level Query-by-String Lexicon-Free Keyword Spotting (KWS) in handwritten text images. The first one approaches true relevance probabilities by means of computations directly carried out on character lattices obtained from the lines images considered. The second method uses the same character lattices, but it obtains relevance scores by first computing frame-level character sequence scores which resemble the word posteriorgrams used in previous approaches for lexicon-based KWS. The first method results from a formal probabilistic derivation, which allow us to better understand and further develop the underlying ideas. The second one is less formal but, according with experiments presented in the paper, it obtains almost identical results with much lower computational cost. Moreover, in contrast with the first method, the second one allows to directly obtain accurate bounding boxes for the spotted words.This work was partially supported by the Spanish MEC under FPU grant FPU13/06281, by the Generalitat Valenciana under the Prometeo/2009/014 project grant ALMAMATER, and through the EU projects: HIMANIS (JPICH programme, Spanish grant Ref. PCIN-2015-068) and READ (Horizon-2020 programme, grant Ref. 674943).Toselli, AH.; Puigcerver, J.; Vidal, E. (2016). Two Methods to Improve Confidence Scores for Lexicon-Free Word Spotting in Handwritten Text. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICFHR.2016.0072

Querying out-of-vocabulary words in lexicon-based keyword spotting

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00521-016-2197-8[EN] Lexicon-based handwritten text keyword spotting (KWS) has proven to be a faster and more accurate alternative to lexicon-free methods. Nevertheless, since lexicon-based KWS relies on a predefined vocabulary, fixed in the training phase, it does not support queries involving out-of-vocabulary (OOV) keywords. In this paper, we outline previous work aimed at solving this problem and present a new approach based on smoothing the (null) scores of OOV keywords by means of the information provided by ``similar'' in-vocabulary words. Good results achieved using this approach are compared with previously published alternatives on different data sets.This work was partially supported by the Spanish MEC under FPU Grant FPU13/06281, by the Generalitat Valenciana under the Prometeo/2009/014 Project Grant ALMA-MATER, and through the EU Projects: HIMANIS (JPICH programme, Spanish grant Ref. PCIN-2015-068) and READ (Horizon-2020 programme, grant Ref. 674943).Puigcerver, J.; Toselli, AH.; Vidal, E. (2016). Querying out-of-vocabulary words in lexicon-based keyword spotting. Neural Computing and Applications. 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-016-2197-8S110Almazan J, Gordo A, Fornes A, Valveny E (2013) Handwritten word spotting with corrected attributes. In: 2013 IEEE international conference on computer vision (ICCV), pp 1017–1024. doi: 10.1109/ICCV.2013.130Amengual JC, Vidal E (2000) On the estimation of error-correcting parameters. In: Proceedings 15th international conference on pattern recognition, 2000, vol 2, pp 883–886Fernández D, Lladós J, Fornés A (2011) Handwritten word spotting in old manuscript images using a pseudo-structural descriptor organized in a hash structure. In: Vitri'a J, Sanches JM, Hern'andez M (eds) Pattern recognition and image analysis: Proceedings of 5th Iberian Conference, IbPRIA 2011, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, June 8–10. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 628–635. doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-21257-4_78Fischer A, Keller A, Frinken V, Bunke H (2012) Lexicon-free handwritten word spotting using character HMMs. Pattern Recognit Lett 33(7):934–942. doi: 10.1016/j.patrec.2011.09.009 Special Issue on Awards from ICPR 2010Fornés A, Frinken V, Fischer A, Almazán J, Jackson G, Bunke H (2011) A keyword spotting approach using blurred shape model-based descriptors. In: Proceedings of the 2011 workshop on historical document imaging and processing, pp 83–90. ACMFrinken V, Fischer A, Manmatha R, Bunke H (2012) A novel word spotting method based on recurrent neural networks. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 34(2):211–224. doi: 10.1109/TPAMI.2011.113Gatos B, Pratikakis I (2009) Segmentation-free word spotting in historical printed documents. In: 10th International conference on document analysis and recognition, 2009. ICDAR’09, pp 271–275. IEEEJelinek F (1998) Statistical methods for speech recognition. MIT Press, CambridgeKneser R, Ney H (1995) Improved backing-off for N-gram language modeling. In: International conference on acoustics, speech and signal processing (ICASSP ’95), vol 1, pp 181–184. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA. doi: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ICASSP.1995.479394Kolcz A, Alspector J, Augusteijn M, Carlson R, Popescu GV (2000) A line-oriented approach to word spotting in handwritten documents. Pattern Anal Appl 3:153–168. doi: 10.1007/s100440070020Konidaris T, Gatos B, Ntzios K, Pratikakis I, Theodoridis S, Perantonis SJ (2007) Keyword-guided word spotting in historical printed documents using synthetic data and user feedback. Int J Doc Anal Recognit 9(2–4):167–177Kumar G, Govindaraju V (2014) Bayesian active learning for keyword spotting in handwritten documents. In: 2014 22nd International conference on pattern recognition (ICPR), pp 2041–2046. 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In: 7th Iberian conference on pattern recognition and image analysis. SpringerRath T, Manmatha R (2007) Word spotting for historical documents. Int J Doc Anal Recognit 9:139–152Robertson S. (2008) A new interpretation of average precision. In: Proceedings of the international. ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval (SIGIR ’08), pp 689–690. ACM, New York, NY, USA. doi: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1390334.1390453Rodriguez-Serrano JA, Perronnin F (2009) Handwritten word-spotting using hidden markov models and universal vocabularies. Pattern Recognit 42(9):2106–2116. doi: 10.1016/j.patcog.2009.02.005 . http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031320309000673Rusinol M, Aldavert D, Toledo R, Llados J (2011) Browsing heterogeneous document collections by a segmentation-free word spotting method. 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In: 2015 13th International conference on document analysis and recognition (ICDAR), pp 741–745. IEEEWoodland P, Leggetter C, Odell J, Valtchev V, Young S (1995) The 1994 HTK large vocabulary speech recognition system. In: International conference on acoustics, speech, and signal processing (ICASSP ’95), vol 1, pp 73 –76. doi: 10.1109/ICASSP.1995.479276Wshah S, Kumar G, Govindaraju V (2012) Script independent word spotting in offline handwritten documents based on hidden markov models. In: 2012 International conference on frontiers in handwriting recognition (ICFHR), pp 14–19. doi: 10.1109/ICFHR.2012.26

Word graphs size impact on the performance of handwriting document applications

[EN] Two document processing applications are con- sidered: computer-assisted transcription of text images (CATTI) and Keyword Spotting (KWS), for transcribing and indexing handwritten documents, respectively. Instead of working directly on the handwriting images, both of them employ meta-data structures called word graphs (WG), which are obtained using segmentation-free hand- written text recognition technology based on N-gram lan- guage models and hidden Markov models. A WG contains most of the relevant information of the original text (line) image required by CATTI and KWS but, if it is too large, the computational cost of generating and using it can become unafordable. Conversely, if it is too small, relevant information may be lost, leading to a reduction of CATTI or KWS performance. We study the trade-off between WG size and performance in terms of effectiveness and effi- ciency of CATTI and KWS. Results show that small, computationally cheap WGs can be used without loosing the excellent CATTI and KWS performance achieved with huge WGs.Work partially supported by the Generalitat Valenciana under the Prometeo/2009/014 Project Grant ALMAMATER, by the Spanish MECD as part of the Valorization and I+D+I Resources program of VLC/CAMPUS in the International Excellence Campus program, and through the EU projects: HIMANIS (JPICH programme, Spanish Grant Ref. PCIN-2015-068) and READ (Horizon-2020 programme, Grant Ref. 674943).Toselli ., AH.; Romero Gómez, V.; Vidal, E. (2017). Word graphs size impact on the performance of handwriting document applications. Neural Computing and Applications. 28(9):2477-2487. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-016-2336-2S24772487289Amengual JC, Vidal E (1998) Efficient error-correcting Viterbi parsing. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 20(10):1109–1116Bazzi I, Schwartz R, Makhoul J (1999) An omnifont open-vocabulary OCR system for English and Arabic. 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HMM word graph based keyword spotting in handwritten document images

[EN] Line-level keyword spotting (KWS) is presented on the basis of frame-level word posterior probabilities. These posteriors are obtained using word graphs derived from the recogni- tion process of a full-fledged handwritten text recognizer based on hidden Markov models and N-gram language models. This approach has several advantages. First, since it uses a holistic, segmentation-free technology, it does not require any kind of word or charac- ter segmentation. Second, the use of language models allows the context of each spotted word to be taken into account, thereby considerably increasing KWS accuracy. And third, the proposed KWS scores are based on true posterior probabilities, taking into account all (or most) possible word segmentations of the input image. These scores are properly bounded and normalized. This mathematically clean formulation lends itself to smooth, threshold-based keyword queries which, in turn, permit comfortable trade-offs between search precision and recall. Experiments are carried out on several historic collections of handwritten text images, as well as a well-known data set of modern English handwrit- ten text. According to the empirical results, the proposed approach achieves KWS results comparable to those obtained with the recently-introduced "BLSTM neural networks KWS" approach and clearly outperform the popular, state-of-the-art "Filler HMM" KWS method. Overall, the results clearly support all the above-claimed advantages of the proposed ap- proach.This work has been partially supported by the Generalitat Valenciana under the Prometeo/2009/014 project grant ALMA-MATER, and through the EU projects: HIMANIS (JPICH programme, Spanish grant Ref. PCIN-2015-068) and READ (Horizon 2020 programme, grant Ref. 674943).Toselli, AH.; Vidal, E.; Romero, V.; Frinken, V. (2016). HMM word graph based keyword spotting in handwritten document images. Information Sciences. 370:497-518. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2016.07.063S49751837

Exploiting Existing Modern Transcripts for Historical Handwritten Text Recognition

© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[EN] Existing transcripts for historic manuscripts are a very valuable resource for training models useful for automatic recognition, aided transcription, and/or indexing of the remaining untranscribed parts of these collections. However, these existing transcripts generally exhibit two main problems which hinder their convenience: a) text of the transcripts is seldom aligned with manuscript lines, and b) text often deviate very significantly from what can be seen in the manuscript, either because writing style has been modernized or abbreviations have been expanded, or both. This work presents an analysis of these problems and discusses possible solutions for minimizing human effort needed to adapt existing transcripts in order to render them usable. Empirical results presented show the huge performance gain that can be obtained by adequately adapting the transcripts, thus motivating future development of the proposed solutions.We are very grateful to Carlos Lechner and Celio Hernández who helped in the creation of the ground truth of the Alcaraz dataset. This work has been partially supported by the European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 grant READ (Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents) (Ref: 674943), EU project HIMANIS (JPICH programme, Spanish grant Ref: PCIN-2015-068) and MINECO/FEDER, UE under project TIN2015-70924-C2-1-R.Villegas, M.; Toselli, AH.; Romero Gómez, V.; Vidal, E. (2016). Exploiting Existing Modern Transcripts for Historical Handwritten Text Recognition. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICFHR.2016.22

ICFHR2016 Competition on Handwritten Text Recognition on the READ Dataset

© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[EN] This paper describes the Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) competition on the READ dataset that has been held in the context of the International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition 2016. This competition aims to bring together researchers working on off-line HTR and provide them a suitable benchmark to compare their techniques on the task of transcribing typical historical handwritten documents. Two tracks with different conditions on the use of training data were proposed. Ten research groups registered in the competition but finally five submitted results. The handwritten images for this competition were drawn from the German document Ratsprotokolle collection composed of minutes of the council meetings held from 1470 to 1805, used in the READ project. The selected dataset is written by several hands and entails significant variabilities and difficulties. The five participants achieved good results with transcriptions word error rates ranging from 21% to 47% and character error rates rating from 5% to 19%.This work has been partially supported through the European Union's H2020 grant READ (Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents) (Ref: 674943), and the MINECO/FEDER UE project TIN2015-70924-C2-1-R.Sánchez Peiró, JA.; Romero Gómez, V.; Toselli, AH.; Vidal, E. (2016). ICFHR2016 Competition on Handwritten Text Recognition on the READ Dataset. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICFHR.2016.0120

Contex-aware gestures for mixed-initiative text editings UIs

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Interacting with computers following peer review. The version of record is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwu019[EN] This work is focused on enhancing highly interactive text-editing applications with gestures. Concretely, we study Computer Assisted Transcription of Text Images (CATTI), a handwriting transcription system that follows a corrective feedback paradigm, where both the user and the system collaborate efficiently to produce a high-quality text transcription. CATTI-like applications demand fast and accurate gesture recognition, for which we observed that current gesture recognizers are not adequate enough. In response to this need we developed MinGestures, a parametric context-aware gesture recognizer. Our contributions include a number of stroke features for disambiguating copy-mark gestures from handwritten text, plus the integration of these gestures in a CATTI application. It becomes finally possible to create highly interactive stroke-based text-editing interfaces, without worrying to verify the user intent on-screen. We performed a formal evaluation with 22 e-pen users and 32 mouse users using a gesture vocabulary of 10 symbols. MinGestures achieved an outstanding accuracy (<1% error rate) with very high performance (<1 ms of recognition time). We then integrated MinGestures in a CATTI prototype and tested the performance of the interactive handwriting system when it is driven by gestures. Our results show that using gestures in interactive handwriting applications is both advantageous and convenient when gestures are simple but context-aware. Taken together, this work suggests that text-editing interfaces not only can be easily augmented with simple gestures, but also may substantially improve user productivity.This work has been supported by the European Commission through the 7th Framework Program (tranScriptorium: FP7- ICT-2011-9, project 600707 and CasMaCat: FP7-ICT-2011-7, project 287576). It has also been supported by the Spanish MINECO under grant TIN2012-37475-C02-01 (STraDa), and the Generalitat Valenciana under grant ISIC/2012/004 (AMIIS).Leiva, LA.; Alabau, V.; Romero Gómez, V.; Toselli, AH.; Vidal, E. (2015). Contex-aware gestures for mixed-initiative text editings UIs. Interacting with Computers. 27(6):675-696. https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwu019S675696276Alabau V. Leiva L. A. Transcribing Handwritten Text Images with a Word Soup Game. Proc. Extended Abstr. Hum. Factors Comput. Syst. (CHI EA) 2012.Alabau V. Rodríguez-Ruiz L. Sanchis A. Martínez-Gómez P. Casacuberta F. 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A Set of Benchmarks for Handwritten Text Recognition on Historical Documents

[EN] Handwritten Text Recognition is a important requirement in order to make visible the contents of the myriads of historical documents residing in public and private archives and libraries world wide. Automatic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is a challenging problem that requires a careful combination of several advanced Pattern Recognition techniques, including but not limited to Image Processing, Document Image Analysis, Feature Extraction, Neural Network approaches and Language Modeling. The progress of this kind of systems is strongly bound by the availability of adequate benchmarking datasets, software tools and reproducible results achieved using the corresponding tools and datasets. Based on English and German historical documents proposed in recent open competitions at ICDAR and ICFHR conferences between 2014 and 2017, this paper introduces four HTR benchmarks in order of increasing complexity from several points of view. For each benchmark, a specific system is proposed which overcomes results published so far under comparable conditions. Therefore, this paper establishes new state of the art baseline systems and results which aim at becoming new challenges that would hopefully drive further improvement of HTR technologies. Both the datasets and the software tools used to implement the baseline systems are made freely accessible for research purposes. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.This work has been partially supported through the European Union's H2020 grant READ (Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents) (Ref: 674943), as well as by the BBVA Foundation through the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 Digital Humanities research grants "Carabela" and "HisClima - Dos Siglos de Datos Cilmaticos", and by EU JPICH project "HOME - History Of Medieval Europe" (Spanish PEICTI Ref. PC12018-093122).Sánchez Peiró, JA.; Romero, V.; Toselli, AH.; Villegas, M.; Vidal, E. (2019). A Set of Benchmarks for Handwritten Text Recognition on Historical Documents. Pattern Recognition. 94:122-134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2019.05.025S1221349

ICFHR2016 Handwritten Keyword Spotting Competition (H-KWS 2016)

© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[EN] The H-KWS 2016, organized in the context of the ICFHR 2016 conference aims at setting up an evaluation framework for benchmarking handwritten keyword spotting (KWS) examining both the Query by Example (QbE) and the Query by String (QbS) approaches. Both KWS approaches were hosted into two different tracks, which in turn were split into two distinct challenges, namely, a segmentation-based and a segmentation-free to accommodate different perspectives adopted by researchers in the KWS field. In addition, the competition aims to evaluate the submitted training-based methods under different amounts of training data. Four participants submitted at least one solution to one of the challenges, according to the capabilities and/or restrictions of their systems. The data used in the competition consisted of historical German and English documents with their own characteristics and complexities. This paper presents the details of the competition, including the data, evaluation metrics and results of the best run of each participating methods.This work was partially supported by the Spanish MEC under FPU grant FPU13/06281, by the Generalitat Valenciana under the Prometeo/2009/014 project grant ALMA-MATER, and through the EU projects: HIMANIS (JPICH programme, Spanish grant Ref. PCIN-2015-068) and READ (Horizon-2020 programme, grant Ref. 674943).Pratikakis, I.; Zagoris, K.; Gatos, B.; Puigcerver, J.; Toselli, AH.; Vidal, E. (2016). ICFHR2016 Handwritten Keyword Spotting Competition (H-KWS 2016). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICFHR.2016.0117