Abstract

A large annotated corpus is critical to the development of robust optical character recognizers (OCRs). However, creation of annotated corpora is a tedious task. It is laborious, especially when the annotation is at the character level. In this paper, we propose an efficient hierarchical approach for annotation of large collection of printed document images. We align document images with independently keyed-in text. The method is model-driven and is intended to annotate large collection of documents, scanned in three different resolutions, at character level. We employ an XML representation for storage of the annotation information. APIs are provided for access at content level for easy use in training and evaluation of OCRs and other document understanding tasks.

Abstract

This paper explores the possibility of using convex optimization to address a class of problems in visual servoing. This work is motivated by the recent success of convex optimization methods in solving geometric inference problems in computer vision. We formulate the visual servoing problem with feature visibility constraints as a convex optimization of a function of the camera position i.e. the translation of the camera. First, the path is planned using potential field method that produces unconstrained but straight line path from the initial to the desired camera position. The problem is then converted to a constrained convex optimization problem by introducing the visibility constraints to the minimization problem. The objective of the minimization process is to find for each camera position the closest alternate position from which all features are visible. This algorithm ensures that the solution is optimal. This formulation allows the introduction of more constraints, like joint limits of the arm, into the visual servoing process. The results have been illustrated in a simulation framework.

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient indexing and retrieval scheme for searching in document image databases. In many non-European languages, optical character recognizers are not very accurate. Word spotting - word image matching - may instead be used to retrieve word images in response to a word image query. The approaches used for word spotting so far, dynamic time warping and/or nearest neighbor search, tend to be slow. Here indexing is done using locality sensitive hashing (LSH) - a technique which computes multiple hashes - using word image features computed at word level. Efficiency and scalability is achieved by content-sensitive hashing implemented through approximate nearest neighbor computation. We demonstrate that the technique achieves high precision and recall (in the 90% range), using a large image corpus consisting of seven Kalidasa’s (a well known Indian poet of antiquity) books in the Telugu language. The accuracy is comparable to using dynamic time warping and nearest neighbor search while the speed is orders of magnitude better - 20000 word images can be searched in milliseconds.

Abstract

This paper presents an architecture that enables the recognizer to learn incrementally and, thereby adapt to document image collections for performance improvement. We argue that the recognition scheme for a book could be considerably different from that designed for isolated pages. We employ learning procedures to capture the relevant information available online, and feed it back to update the knowledge of the system. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our design for improving the performance on-the-fly.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of finding the k most similar objects given a query object, in large multimedia datasets. We focus on scenarios where the similarity measure itself is not fixed, but is continuously being refined with user feedback. Conventional database techniques for efficient similarity search are not effective in this environment as they take a specific similarity/distance measure as input and build index structures tuned for that measure. Our approach works effectively in this environment as validated by the experimental study where we evaluate it over a wide range of datasets. The experiments show it to be efficient and scalable. In fact, on all our datasets, the response times were within a few seconds, making our approach suitable for interactive applications.

Abstract

One of the prime challenges in designing a classifier for large-class problems such as Indian language OCRs is the presence of a large similar looking character set. The nature of the character set introduces problems with accuracy and efficiency of the classifier. Hierarchical classifiers such as Binary Hierarchical Decision Trees (BHDTs) using SVMs as component classifiers have been effectively used to tackle such large-class classification problems. The accuracy and efficiency of a BHDT classifier will depend on: i) the accuracy of the component classifiers, ii) the separability of the clusters at each node in a hierarchical classifier, and iii) the balance of the BHDT. We propose methods to tackle each of the above problems in the case of binary character images. We present a new distance measure, which is intuitively suitable when Support Vector Machines are used as component classifiers. We also propose a novel method for balancing the BHDT to improve its efficiency, while maintaining the accuracy. Finally we propose a method to generate overlapping partitions to improve the accuracy of BHDTs. Comparison of the method with other forms of classifier combination techniques such as 1vs1, 1vsRest and Decision Directed Acyclic Graphs shows that the proposed approach is highly efficient, while being comparable with the more expensive techniques in terms of accuracy. The experiments are focused on the problem of Indian language OCR, while the framework is usable for other problems as well

Abstract

Accurate registration of images is essential for many computer vision algorithms for medical image analysis, super-resolution, and image mosaicing. Performance of traditional correspondence-based approaches is restricted by the reliability of the feature detector. Popular frequency domain approaches use the magnitude of global frequencies for registration, and are limited in the class of transformations that can be estimated. We propose the use of local phase information for accurate image registration as it is robust to noise and illumination conditions and the estimates are obtained at sub-pixel accuracy without any correspondence computation. We form an overdetermined system of equations from the phase differences to estimate the parameters of image registration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach for affine transformation under Gaussian white noise and varying illumination conditions.

Abstract

Post-processors are critical to the performance of language recognizers like OCRs, speech recognizers, etc. Dictionary-based post-processing commonly employ either an algorithmic approach or a statistical approach. Other linguistic features are not exploited for this purpose. The language analysis is also largely limited to the prose form.This paper proposes a framework to use the rich metric and formal structure of classical poetic forms in Indian languages for post-processing a recognizer like an OCR engine. We show that the structure present in the form of the vrtta and prasa ¯ can be efficiently used to disambiguate some cases that may be difficult for an OCR. The approach is efficient, and complementary to other post-processing approaches and can be used in conjunction with them.

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of temporal segmentation of videos. We present a multi-modal approach where clues from different information sources are merged to perform the segmentation. Specifically, we segment videos based on textual descriptions or commentaries of the action in the video. Such a parallel information is available for cricket videos, a class of videos where visual feature based (bottom-up) scene segmentation algorithms generally fail, due to lack of visual dissimilarity across space and time. With additional topdown information from textual domain, these ambiguities could be resolved to a large extent. The video is segmented to meaningful entities or scenes, using the scene level descriptions provided by the commentary. These segments can then be automatically annotated with the respective descriptions. This allows for a semantic access and retrieval of video segments, which is difficult to obtain from existing visual feature based approaches. We also present techniques for automatic highlight generation using our scheme.

Abstract

This paper presents a vision-based control for positioning a camera with respect to an unknown piecewise planar object. We introduce a novel homography-based approach that integrates information from multiple homographies to reliably estimate the relative displacement of the camera. This approach is robust to image measurement errors and provides a stable estimate of the camera motion that is free from degeneracies in the task space. We also develop a new control formulation that meets the contradictory requirements of producing a decoupled camera trajectory and ensuring object visibility by only utilizing the homography relating the two views. Experimental results validate the efficiency and robustness of our approach and demonstrate its applicability