A. Fornes - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by A. Fornes

Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage

Recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, and Document Image Analysis and R... more Recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, and Document Image Analysis and Recognition have significantly eased the creation of digital libraries and the transcription of historical documents. However, for documents in rare scripts with few labelled training data available, current Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) systems are too constraining. Moreover, research on HTR often focuses on technical aspects only, and rarely puts emphasis on implementing software tools for scholars in Humanities. In this article, we describe, compare, and analyse different transcription methods for rare scripts. We evaluate their performance in a real-use case of a medieval manuscript written in the runic script ( Codex Runicus ) and discuss advantages and disadvantages of each method from the user perspective. From this exhaustive analysis and comparison with a fully manual transcription, we raise conclusions and provide recommendations to scholars interested in using automatic tr...

Pattern Recognition Letters

Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, ... more Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, is a challenging problem. The main difficulty comes from the very few annotated data and the limited linguistic information (e.g. dictionaries and language models). Thus, we propose a few-shot learning-based handwriting recognition approach that significantly reduces the human labor annotation process, requiring only few images of each alphabet symbol. The method consists in detecting all the symbols of a given alphabet in a textline image and decoding the obtained similarity scores to the final sequence of transcribed symbols. Our model is first pretrained on synthetic line images generated from any alphabet, even though different from the target domain. A second training step is then applied to diminish the gap between the source and target data. Since this retraining would require annotation of thousands of handwritten symbols together with their bounding boxes, we propose to avoid such human effort through an unsupervised progressive learning approach that automatically assigns pseudo-labels to the non-annotated data. The evaluation on different manuscript datasets show that our model can lead to competitive results with a significant reduction in human effort.

arXiv (Cornell University), Sep 26, 2020

Encoded (or ciphered) manuscripts are a special type of historical documents that contain encrypt... more Encoded (or ciphered) manuscripts are a special type of historical documents that contain encrypted text. The automatic recognition of this kind of documents is challenging because: 1) the cipher alphabet changes from one document to another, 2) there is a lack of annotated corpus for training and 3) touching symbols make the symbol segmentation difficult and complex. To overcome these difficulties, we propose a novel method for handwritten ciphers recognition based on few-shot object detection. Our method first detects all symbols of a given alphabet in a line image, and then a decoding step maps the symbol similarity scores to the final sequence of transcribed symbols. By training on synthetic data, we show that the proposed architecture is able to recognize handwritten ciphers with unseen alphabets. In addition, if few labeled pages with the same alphabet are used for fine tuning, our method surpasses existing unsupervised and supervised HTR methods for ciphers recognition.

Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Digital Access to Textual Cultural Heritage, 2019

Historical ciphers, a special type of manuscripts, contain encrypted information, important for t... more Historical ciphers, a special type of manuscripts, contain encrypted information, important for the interpretation of our history. The first step towards decipherment is to transcribe the images, either manually or by automatic image processing techniques. Despite the improvements in handwritten text recognition (HTR) thanks to deep learning methodologies, the need of labelled data to train is an important limitation. Given that ciphers often use symbol sets across various alphabets and unique symbols without any transcription scheme available, these supervised HTR techniques are not suitable to transcribe ciphers. In this paper we propose an unsupervised method for transcribing encrypted manuscripts based on clustering and label propagation, which has been successfully applied to community detection in networks. We analyze the performance on ciphers with various symbol sets, and discuss the advantages and drawbacks compared to supervised HTR methods. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Document management and text processing; Document capture; Optical character recognition;

2022 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2022

Low resource Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is a hard problem due to the scarce annotated dat... more Low resource Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is a hard problem due to the scarce annotated data and the very limited linguistic information (dictionaries and language models). For example, in the case of historical ciphered manuscripts, which are usually written with invented alphabets to hide the message contents. Thus, in this paper we address this problem through a data generation technique based on Bayesian Program Learning (BPL). Contrary to traditional generation approaches, which require a huge amount of annotated images, our method is able to generate human-like handwriting using only one sample of each symbol in the alphabet. After generating symbols, we create synthetic lines to train state-of-the-art HTR architectures in a segmentation free fashion. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were carried out and confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Pattern Recognition Letters, Aug 1, 2022

Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, ... more Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, is a challenging problem. The main difficulty comes from the very few annotated data and the limited linguistic information (e.g. dictionaries and language models). Thus, we propose a few-shot learning-based handwriting recognition approach that significantly reduces the human labor annotation process, requiring only few images of each alphabet symbol. The method consists in detecting all the symbols of a given alphabet in a textline image and decoding the obtained similarity scores to the final sequence of transcribed symbols. Our model is first pretrained on synthetic line images generated from any alphabet, even though different from the target domain. A second training step is then applied to diminish the gap between the source and target data. Since this retraining would require annotation of thousands of handwritten symbols together with their bounding boxes, we propose to avoid such human effort through an unsupervised progressive learning approach that automatically assigns pseudo-labels to the non-annotated data. The evaluation on different manuscript datasets show that our model can lead to competitive results with a significant reduction in human effort.

Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, ... more Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, is a challenging problem. The main difficulty comes from the very few annotated data and the limited linguistic information (e.g. dictionaries and language models). Thus, we propose a few-shot learning-based handwriting recognition approach that significantly reduces the human labor annotation process, requiring only few images of each alphabet symbol. First, our model detects all symbols of a given alphabet in a textline image, then a decoding step maps the symbol similarity scores to the final sequence of transcribed symbols. Our model is first pretrained on synthetic line images generated from any alphabet, even though different from the target domain. A second training step is then applied to diminish the gap between the source and target data. Since this retraining would require annotation of thousands of handwritten symbols together with their bounding boxes, we propose to avoid su...

2017 14th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), 2017

Graph-based representations are a common way to deal with graphics recognition problems. However,... more Graph-based representations are a common way to deal with graphics recognition problems. However, previous works were mainly focused on developing learning-free techniques. The success of deep learning frameworks have proved that learning is a powerful tool to solve many problems, however it is not straightforward to extend these methodologies to non euclidean data such as graphs. On the other hand, graphs are a good representational structure for graphical entities. In this work, we present some deep learning techniques that have been proposed in the literature for graph-based representations and we show how they can be used in graphics recognition problems.

2017 14th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), 2017

Information Retrieval (IR) is the activity of obtaining information resources relevant to a quest... more Information Retrieval (IR) is the activity of obtaining information resources relevant to a questioned information. It usually retrieves a set of objects ranked according to the relevancy to the needed fact. In document analysis, information retrieval receives a lot of attention in terms of symbol and word spotting. However, through decades the community mostly focused either on printed or on single writer scenario, where the state-of-the-art results have achieved reasonable performance on the available datasets. Nevertheless, the existing algorithms do not perform accordingly on multiwriter scenario. A graph representing relations between a set of objects is a structure where each node delineates an individual element and the similarity between them is represented as a weight on the connecting edge. In this paper, we explore different analytics of graphs constructed from words or graphical symbols, such as diffusion, shortest path, etc. to improve the performance of information retrieval methods in multiwriter scenario.

2020 17th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR), 2020

Despite decades of research in Optical Music Recognition (OMR), the recognition of old handwritte... more Despite decades of research in Optical Music Recognition (OMR), the recognition of old handwritten music scores remains a challenge because of the variabilities in the handwriting styles, paper degradation, lack of standard notation, etc. Therefore, the research in OMR systems adapted to the particularities of old manuscripts is crucial to accelerate the conversion of music scores existing in archives into digital libraries, fostering the dissemination and preservation of our music heritage. In this paper we explore the adaptation of sequence-to-sequence models with attention mechanism (used in translation and handwritten text recognition) and the generation of specific synthetic data for recognizing old music scores. The experimental validation demonstrates that our approach is promising, especially when compared with long short-term memory neural networks.

2012 International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, 2012

In this paper we propose an approach for word spotting in handwritten document images. We state t... more In this paper we propose an approach for word spotting in handwritten document images. We state the problem from a focused retrieval perspective, i.e. locating instances of a query word in a large scale dataset of digitized manuscripts. We combine two approaches, namely one based on word segmentation and another one segmentation-free. The first approach uses a hashing strategy to coarsely prune word images that are unlikely to be instances of the query word. This process is fast but has a low precision due to the errors introduced in the segmentation step. The regions containing candidate words are sent to the second process based on a state of the art technique from the visual object detection field. This discriminative model represents the appearance of the query word and computes a similarity score. In this way we propose a coarse-to-fine approach achieving a compromise between efficiency and accuracy. The validation of the model is shown using a collection of old handwritten manuscripts. We appreciate a substantial improvement in terms of precision regarding the previous proposed method with a low computational cost increase.

2009 10th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, 2009

Writer identification consists in determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of ... more Writer identification consists in determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of writers. In this paper we present a system for writer identification in old handwritten music scores which uses only music notation to determine the author. The steps of the proposed system are the following. First of all, the music sheet is preprocessed for obtaining a music score without the staff lines. Afterwards, four different methods for generating texture images from music symbols are applied. Every approach uses a different spatial variation when combining the music symbols to generate the textures. Finally, Gabor filters and Grey-scale Co-ocurrence matrices are used to obtain the features. The classification is performed using a k-NN classifier based on Euclidean distance. The proposed method has been tested on a database of old music scores from the 17th to 19th centuries, achieving encouraging identification rates.

2010 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 2010

2011 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, 2011

2014 11th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems, 2014

Effective information retrieval on handwritten document images has always been a challenging task... more Effective information retrieval on handwritten document images has always been a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel handwritten word spotting approach based on graph representation. The presented model comprises both topological and morphological signatures of handwriting. Skeleton-based graphs with the Shape Context labelled vertexes are established for connected components. Each word image is represented as a sequence of graphs. In order to be robust to the handwriting variations, an exhaustive merging process based on DTW alignment result is introduced in the similarity measure between word images. With respect to the computation complexity, an approximate graph edit distance approach using bipartite matching is employed for graph matching. The experiments on the George Washington dataset and the marriage records from the Barcelona Cathedral dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art structural methods.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 2008

Intelligent Virtual Agents, 2003

Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage

Recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, and Document Image Analysis and R... more Recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, and Document Image Analysis and Recognition have significantly eased the creation of digital libraries and the transcription of historical documents. However, for documents in rare scripts with few labelled training data available, current Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) systems are too constraining. Moreover, research on HTR often focuses on technical aspects only, and rarely puts emphasis on implementing software tools for scholars in Humanities. In this article, we describe, compare, and analyse different transcription methods for rare scripts. We evaluate their performance in a real-use case of a medieval manuscript written in the runic script ( Codex Runicus ) and discuss advantages and disadvantages of each method from the user perspective. From this exhaustive analysis and comparison with a fully manual transcription, we raise conclusions and provide recommendations to scholars interested in using automatic tr...

Pattern Recognition Letters

Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, ... more Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, is a challenging problem. The main difficulty comes from the very few annotated data and the limited linguistic information (e.g. dictionaries and language models). Thus, we propose a few-shot learning-based handwriting recognition approach that significantly reduces the human labor annotation process, requiring only few images of each alphabet symbol. The method consists in detecting all the symbols of a given alphabet in a textline image and decoding the obtained similarity scores to the final sequence of transcribed symbols. Our model is first pretrained on synthetic line images generated from any alphabet, even though different from the target domain. A second training step is then applied to diminish the gap between the source and target data. Since this retraining would require annotation of thousands of handwritten symbols together with their bounding boxes, we propose to avoid such human effort through an unsupervised progressive learning approach that automatically assigns pseudo-labels to the non-annotated data. The evaluation on different manuscript datasets show that our model can lead to competitive results with a significant reduction in human effort.

arXiv (Cornell University), Sep 26, 2020

Encoded (or ciphered) manuscripts are a special type of historical documents that contain encrypt... more Encoded (or ciphered) manuscripts are a special type of historical documents that contain encrypted text. The automatic recognition of this kind of documents is challenging because: 1) the cipher alphabet changes from one document to another, 2) there is a lack of annotated corpus for training and 3) touching symbols make the symbol segmentation difficult and complex. To overcome these difficulties, we propose a novel method for handwritten ciphers recognition based on few-shot object detection. Our method first detects all symbols of a given alphabet in a line image, and then a decoding step maps the symbol similarity scores to the final sequence of transcribed symbols. By training on synthetic data, we show that the proposed architecture is able to recognize handwritten ciphers with unseen alphabets. In addition, if few labeled pages with the same alphabet are used for fine tuning, our method surpasses existing unsupervised and supervised HTR methods for ciphers recognition.

Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Digital Access to Textual Cultural Heritage, 2019

Historical ciphers, a special type of manuscripts, contain encrypted information, important for t... more Historical ciphers, a special type of manuscripts, contain encrypted information, important for the interpretation of our history. The first step towards decipherment is to transcribe the images, either manually or by automatic image processing techniques. Despite the improvements in handwritten text recognition (HTR) thanks to deep learning methodologies, the need of labelled data to train is an important limitation. Given that ciphers often use symbol sets across various alphabets and unique symbols without any transcription scheme available, these supervised HTR techniques are not suitable to transcribe ciphers. In this paper we propose an unsupervised method for transcribing encrypted manuscripts based on clustering and label propagation, which has been successfully applied to community detection in networks. We analyze the performance on ciphers with various symbol sets, and discuss the advantages and drawbacks compared to supervised HTR methods. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Document management and text processing; Document capture; Optical character recognition;

2022 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2022

Low resource Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is a hard problem due to the scarce annotated dat... more Low resource Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is a hard problem due to the scarce annotated data and the very limited linguistic information (dictionaries and language models). For example, in the case of historical ciphered manuscripts, which are usually written with invented alphabets to hide the message contents. Thus, in this paper we address this problem through a data generation technique based on Bayesian Program Learning (BPL). Contrary to traditional generation approaches, which require a huge amount of annotated images, our method is able to generate human-like handwriting using only one sample of each symbol in the alphabet. After generating symbols, we create synthetic lines to train state-of-the-art HTR architectures in a segmentation free fashion. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were carried out and confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Pattern Recognition Letters, Aug 1, 2022

Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, ... more Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, is a challenging problem. The main difficulty comes from the very few annotated data and the limited linguistic information (e.g. dictionaries and language models). Thus, we propose a few-shot learning-based handwriting recognition approach that significantly reduces the human labor annotation process, requiring only few images of each alphabet symbol. The method consists in detecting all the symbols of a given alphabet in a textline image and decoding the obtained similarity scores to the final sequence of transcribed symbols. Our model is first pretrained on synthetic line images generated from any alphabet, even though different from the target domain. A second training step is then applied to diminish the gap between the source and target data. Since this retraining would require annotation of thousands of handwritten symbols together with their bounding boxes, we propose to avoid such human effort through an unsupervised progressive learning approach that automatically assigns pseudo-labels to the non-annotated data. The evaluation on different manuscript datasets show that our model can lead to competitive results with a significant reduction in human effort.

Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, ... more Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, is a challenging problem. The main difficulty comes from the very few annotated data and the limited linguistic information (e.g. dictionaries and language models). Thus, we propose a few-shot learning-based handwriting recognition approach that significantly reduces the human labor annotation process, requiring only few images of each alphabet symbol. First, our model detects all symbols of a given alphabet in a textline image, then a decoding step maps the symbol similarity scores to the final sequence of transcribed symbols. Our model is first pretrained on synthetic line images generated from any alphabet, even though different from the target domain. A second training step is then applied to diminish the gap between the source and target data. Since this retraining would require annotation of thousands of handwritten symbols together with their bounding boxes, we propose to avoid su...

2017 14th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), 2017

Graph-based representations are a common way to deal with graphics recognition problems. However,... more Graph-based representations are a common way to deal with graphics recognition problems. However, previous works were mainly focused on developing learning-free techniques. The success of deep learning frameworks have proved that learning is a powerful tool to solve many problems, however it is not straightforward to extend these methodologies to non euclidean data such as graphs. On the other hand, graphs are a good representational structure for graphical entities. In this work, we present some deep learning techniques that have been proposed in the literature for graph-based representations and we show how they can be used in graphics recognition problems.

2017 14th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), 2017

Information Retrieval (IR) is the activity of obtaining information resources relevant to a quest... more Information Retrieval (IR) is the activity of obtaining information resources relevant to a questioned information. It usually retrieves a set of objects ranked according to the relevancy to the needed fact. In document analysis, information retrieval receives a lot of attention in terms of symbol and word spotting. However, through decades the community mostly focused either on printed or on single writer scenario, where the state-of-the-art results have achieved reasonable performance on the available datasets. Nevertheless, the existing algorithms do not perform accordingly on multiwriter scenario. A graph representing relations between a set of objects is a structure where each node delineates an individual element and the similarity between them is represented as a weight on the connecting edge. In this paper, we explore different analytics of graphs constructed from words or graphical symbols, such as diffusion, shortest path, etc. to improve the performance of information retrieval methods in multiwriter scenario.

2020 17th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR), 2020

Despite decades of research in Optical Music Recognition (OMR), the recognition of old handwritte... more Despite decades of research in Optical Music Recognition (OMR), the recognition of old handwritten music scores remains a challenge because of the variabilities in the handwriting styles, paper degradation, lack of standard notation, etc. Therefore, the research in OMR systems adapted to the particularities of old manuscripts is crucial to accelerate the conversion of music scores existing in archives into digital libraries, fostering the dissemination and preservation of our music heritage. In this paper we explore the adaptation of sequence-to-sequence models with attention mechanism (used in translation and handwritten text recognition) and the generation of specific synthetic data for recognizing old music scores. The experimental validation demonstrates that our approach is promising, especially when compared with long short-term memory neural networks.

2012 International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, 2012

In this paper we propose an approach for word spotting in handwritten document images. We state t... more In this paper we propose an approach for word spotting in handwritten document images. We state the problem from a focused retrieval perspective, i.e. locating instances of a query word in a large scale dataset of digitized manuscripts. We combine two approaches, namely one based on word segmentation and another one segmentation-free. The first approach uses a hashing strategy to coarsely prune word images that are unlikely to be instances of the query word. This process is fast but has a low precision due to the errors introduced in the segmentation step. The regions containing candidate words are sent to the second process based on a state of the art technique from the visual object detection field. This discriminative model represents the appearance of the query word and computes a similarity score. In this way we propose a coarse-to-fine approach achieving a compromise between efficiency and accuracy. The validation of the model is shown using a collection of old handwritten manuscripts. We appreciate a substantial improvement in terms of precision regarding the previous proposed method with a low computational cost increase.

2009 10th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, 2009

Writer identification consists in determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of ... more Writer identification consists in determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of writers. In this paper we present a system for writer identification in old handwritten music scores which uses only music notation to determine the author. The steps of the proposed system are the following. First of all, the music sheet is preprocessed for obtaining a music score without the staff lines. Afterwards, four different methods for generating texture images from music symbols are applied. Every approach uses a different spatial variation when combining the music symbols to generate the textures. Finally, Gabor filters and Grey-scale Co-ocurrence matrices are used to obtain the features. The classification is performed using a k-NN classifier based on Euclidean distance. The proposed method has been tested on a database of old music scores from the 17th to 19th centuries, achieving encouraging identification rates.

2010 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 2010

2011 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, 2011

2014 11th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems, 2014

Effective information retrieval on handwritten document images has always been a challenging task... more Effective information retrieval on handwritten document images has always been a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel handwritten word spotting approach based on graph representation. The presented model comprises both topological and morphological signatures of handwriting. Skeleton-based graphs with the Shape Context labelled vertexes are established for connected components. Each word image is represented as a sequence of graphs. In order to be robust to the handwriting variations, an exhaustive merging process based on DTW alignment result is introduced in the similarity measure between word images. With respect to the computation complexity, an approximate graph edit distance approach using bipartite matching is employed for graph matching. The experiments on the George Washington dataset and the marriage records from the Barcelona Cathedral dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art structural methods.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 2008

Intelligent Virtual Agents, 2003