Document Image Analysis for World War II Personal Records

Complete collections of invaluable documents of unique historical and political significance are decaying and at the same time they are virtually inaccessible, necessitating the invention of robust and efficient methods for their conversion into a searchable electronic form. This paper presents the issues encountered and problems addressed in the MEMORIAL project, whose goal is the establishment of a digital document workbench enabling the creation of distributed virtual archives based on documents existing in libraries, archives, museums, memorials, and public record offices. Successful approaches are described in the context of the chosen data class: a variety of typewritten documents containing personal information relating to the presence of individuals in World War II Nazi concentration camps

Supervised cross-modal factor analysis for multiple modal data classification

In this paper we study the problem of learning from multiple modal data for purpose of document classification. In this problem, each document is composed two different modals of data, i.e., an image and a text. Cross-modal factor analysis (CFA) has been proposed to project the two different modals of data to a shared data space, so that the classification of a image or a text can be performed directly in this space. A disadvantage of CFA is that it has ignored the supervision information. In this paper, we improve CFA by incorporating the supervision information to represent and classify both image and text modals of documents. We project both image and text data to a shared data space by factor analysis, and then train a class label predictor in the shared space to use the class label information. The factor analysis parameter and the predictor parameter are learned jointly by solving one single objective function. With this objective function, we minimize the distance between the projections of image and text of the same document, and the classification error of the projection measured by hinge loss function. The objective function is optimized by an alternate optimization strategy in an iterative algorithm. Experiments in two different multiple modal document data sets show the advantage of the proposed algorithm over other CFA methods

A Comprehensive Study of ImageNet Pre-Training for Historical Document Image Analysis

Automatic analysis of scanned historical documents comprises a wide range of image analysis tasks, which are often challenging for machine learning due to a lack of human-annotated learning samples. With the advent of deep neural networks, a promising way to cope with the lack of training data is to pre-train models on images from a different domain and then fine-tune them on historical documents. In the current research, a typical example of such cross-domain transfer learning is the use of neural networks that have been pre-trained on the ImageNet database for object recognition. It remains a mostly open question whether or not this pre-training helps to analyse historical documents, which have fundamentally different image properties when compared with ImageNet. In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical survey on the effect of ImageNet pre-training for diverse historical document analysis tasks, including character recognition, style classification, manuscript dating, semantic segmentation, and content-based retrieval. While we obtain mixed results for semantic segmentation at pixel-level, we observe a clear trend across different network architectures that ImageNet pre-training has a positive effect on classification as well as content-based retrieval

Extraction of Projection Profile, Run-Histogram and Entropy Features Straight from Run-Length Compressed Text-Documents

Document Image Analysis, like any Digital Image Analysis requires identification and extraction of proper features, which are generally extracted from uncompressed images, though in reality images are made available in compressed form for the reasons such as transmission and storage efficiency. However, this implies that the compressed image should be decompressed, which indents additional computing resources. This limitation induces the motivation to research in extracting features directly from the compressed image. In this research, we propose to extract essential features such as projection profile, run-histogram and entropy for text document analysis directly from run-length compressed text-documents. The experimentation illustrates that features are extracted directly from the compressed image without going through the stage of decompression, because of which the computing time is reduced. The feature values so extracted are exactly identical to those extracted from uncompressed images.Comment: Published by IEEE in Proceedings of ACPR-2013. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1403.778