A new scheme for unconstrained handwritten text-line segmentation

Variations in inter-line gaps and skewed or curled text-lines are some of the challenging issues in segmentation of handwritten text-lines. Moreover, overlapping and touching text-lines that frequently appear in unconstrained handwritten text documents significantly increase segmentation complexities. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for unconstrained handwritten text-line segmentation. A new painting technique is employed to smear the foreground portion of the document image. The painting technique enhances the separability between the foreground and background portions enabling easy detection of text-lines. A dilation operation is employed on the foreground portion of the painted image to obtain a single component for each text-line. Thinning of the background portion of the dilated image and subsequently some trimming operations are performed to obtain a number of separating lines, called candidate line separators. By using the starting and ending points of the candidate line separators and analyzing the distances among them, related candidate line separators are connected to obtain segmented text-lines. Furthermore, the problems of overlapping and touching components are addressed using some novel techniques. We tested the proposed scheme on text-pages of English, French, German, Greek, Persian, Oriya and Bangla and remarkable results were obtained.     

东巴象形文字文档图像的文本行自动分割算法研究

以卷积神经网络(CNN)为代表的深度学习技术在图像分类和识别领域表现出了非常优异的性能。 但东巴象形文字未有标准、公开的数据集,无法借鉴或使用已有的深度学习算法。为了快速建立权威、有效的东 巴文字库,分析已出版东巴文档的版面结构,从文档中提取文本行、东巴字成为了当前的首要任务。因此,结合 东巴象形文字文档图像的结构特点,给出了东巴文档图像的文本行自动分割算法。首先利用基于密度和距离的 k均值聚类算法确定了文本行的分类数量和分类标准;然后,通过文字块的二次处理矫正了分割中的错误结果,提 高了算法的准确率。在充分利用东巴字文档结构特征的同时,保留了机器学习模型客观、无主观经验影响的优势。 通过实验表明,该算法可用于东巴文档图像、脱机手写汉字、东巴经的文本行分割,以及文本行中东巴字和汉字 的分割,具有实现简单、准确性高、适应性强的特点,从而为东巴文字库的建立奠定基础。     

Overlapping and multi-touching text-line segmentation by Block Covering analysis

This paper presents a new approach for text-line segmentation based on Block Covering which solves the problem of overlapping and multi-touching components. Block Covering is the core of a system which processes a set of ancient Arabic documents from historical archives. The system is designed for separating text-lines even if they are overlapping and multi-touching. We exploit the Block Covering technique in three steps: a new fractal analysis (Block Counting) for document classification, a statistical analysis of block heights for block classification and a neighboring analysis for building text-lines. The Block Counting fractal analysis, associated with a fuzzy C-means scheme, is performed on document images in order to classify them according to their complexity: tightly (closely) spaced documents (TSD) or widely spaced documents (WSD). An optimal Block Covering is applied on TSD documents which include overlapping and multi-touching lines. The large blocks generated by the covering are then segmented by relying on the statistical analysis of block heights. The final labeling into text-lines is based on a block neighboring analysis. Experimental results provided on images of the Tunisian Historical Archives reveal the feasibility of the Block Covering technique for segmenting ancient Arabic documents.     

Handwritten document image segmentation into text lines and words

Two novel approaches to extract text lines and words from handwritten document are presented. The line segmentation algorithm is based on locating the optimal succession of text and gap areas within vertical zones by applying Viterbi algorithm. Then, a text-line separator drawing technique is applied and finally the connected components are assigned to text lines. Word segmentation is based on a gap metric that exploits the objective function of a soft-margin linear SVM that separates successive connected components. The algorithms tested on the benchmarking datasets of ICDAR07 handwriting segmentation contest and outperformed the participating algorithms.     

Inv3D: a high-resolution 3D invoice dataset for template-guided single-image document unwarping

Numerous business workflows involve printed forms, such as invoices or receipts, which are often manually digitalized to persistently search or store the data. As hardware scanners are costly and inflexible, smartphones are increasingly used for digitalization. Here, processing algorithms need to deal with prevailing environmental factors, such as shadows or crumples. Current state-of-the-art approaches learn supervised image dewarping models based on pairs of raw images and rectification meshes. The available results show promising predictive accuracies for dewarping, but generated errors still lead to sub-optimal information retrieval. In this paper, we explore the potential of improving dewarping models using additional, structured information in the form of invoice templates. We provide two core contributions: (1) a novel dataset, referred to as Inv3D, comprising synthetic and real-world high-resolution invoice images with structural templates, rectification meshes, and a multiplicity of per-pixel supervision signals and (2) a novel image dewarping algorithm, which extends the state-of-the-art approach GeoTr to leverage structural templates using attention. Our extensive evaluation includes an implementation of DewarpNet and shows that exploiting structured templates can improve the performance for image dewarping. We report superior performance for the proposed algorithm on our new benchmark for all metrics, including an improved local distortion of 26.1 %. We made our new dataset and all code publicly available at https://felixhertlein.github.io/inv3d.

     

朝汉混排古籍的文字切分方法

为解决朝鲜语古籍数字化中朝汉文种混排字符切分困难的问题,提出一种朝鲜语古籍图像的文字切分算法。针对古籍列与列之间存在不连续间隔线、倾斜或者粘连等问题,提出一种基于连通域投影的列切分方法。利用连通域的删除、合并、拆分等操作对文字进行切分。使用一种多步切分法完成了具有文字大小不一,横向、纵向混合排版特点图像的字符切分工作。对于粘连字,采用改进的滴水算法进行有效切分。实验结果表明所提出的算法能够很好地完成朝、汉文种混排,文字大小不一,排版情况复杂的朝鲜语古籍图像的文字切分工作。该算法的列切分准确率为97.69%,字切分准确率为87.79%。     

基于几何约束的文本图像倾斜角检测算法

针对文本图像倾斜检测的问题, 提出了一种新的基于几何约束的文本图像倾斜角自动检测算法。该算法采用边界标记自动机的方法对一组同行字符轮廓进行检测从而得到该组字符轮廓的最低点信息, 再用矩的方法剔除噪声字符, 并确定页面的倾斜角度。实验结果表明, 该算法在检测效率与准确率上都有了明显的提高, 同时在处理较大倾斜角和较少字符数目的倾斜检测中也有较好的执行效率。因此, 该算法可广泛应用于包括英文、中文、日文在内的多种语言文本图像的倾斜检测中。     

Document representation and its application to page decomposition

Transforming a paper document to its electronic version in a form suitable for efficient storage, retrieval, and interpretation continues to be a challenging problem. An efficient representation scheme for document images is necessary to solve this problem. Document representation involves techniques of thresholding, skew detection, geometric layout analysis, and logical layout analysis. The derived representation can then be used in document storage and retrieval. Page segmentation is an important stage in representing document images obtained by scanning journal pages. The performance of a document understanding system greatly depends on the correctness of page segmentation and labeling of different regions such as text, tables, images, drawings, and rulers. We use the traditional bottom-up approach based on the connected component extraction to efficiently implement page segmentation and region identification. A new document model which preserves top-down generation information is proposed based on which a document is logically represented for interactive editing, storage, retrieval, transfer, and logical analysis. Our algorithm has a high accuracy and takes approximately 1.4 seconds on a SGI Indy workstation for model creation, including orientation estimation, segmentation, and labeling (text, table, image, drawing, and ruler) for a 2550×3300 image of a typical journal page scanned at 300 dpi. This method is applicable to documents from various technical journals and can accommodate moderate amounts of skew and noise     

A knowledge-based system for extracting text-lines from mixed and overlapping text/graphics compound document images

This paper presents a new knowledge-based system for extracting and identifying text-lines from various real-life mixed text/graphics compound document images. The proposed system first decomposes the document image into distinct object planes to separate homogeneous objects, including textual regions of interest, non-text objects such as graphics and pictures, and background textures. A knowledge-based text extraction and identification method obtains the text-lines with different characteristics in each plane. The proposed system offers high flexibility and expandability by merely updating new rules to cope with various types of real-life complex document images. Experimental and comparative results prove the effectiveness of the proposed knowledge-based system and its advantages in extracting text-lines with a large variety of illumination levels, sizes, and font styles from various types of mixed and overlapping text/graphics complex compound document images.     

Page segmentation using minimum homogeneity algorithm and adaptive mathematical morphology

Document layout analysis or page segmentation is the task of decomposing document images into many different regions such as texts, images, separators, and tables. It is still a challenging problem due to the variety of document layouts. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid method, which includes three main stages to deal with this problem. In the first stage, the text and non-text elements are classified by using minimum homogeneity algorithm. This method is the combination of connected component analysis and multilevel homogeneity structure. Then, in the second stage, a new homogeneity structure is combined with an adaptive mathematical morphology in the text document to get a set of text regions. Besides, on the non-text document, further classification of non-text elements is applied to get separator regions, table regions, image regions, etc. The final stage, in refinement region and noise detection process, all regions both in the text document and non-text document are refined to eliminate noises and get the geometric layout of each region. The proposed method has been tested with the dataset of ICDAR2009 page segmentation competition and many other databases with different languages. The results of these tests showed that our proposed method achieves a higher accuracy compared to other methods. This proves the effectiveness and superiority of our method.     

Handwritten Chinese text line segmentation by clustering with distance metric learning

Separating text lines in unconstrained handwritten documents remains a challenge because the handwritten text lines are often un-uniformly skewed and curved, and the space between lines is not obvious. In this paper, we propose a novel text line segmentation algorithm based on minimal spanning tree (MST) clustering with distance metric learning. Given a distance metric, the connected components (CCs) of document image are grouped into a tree structure, from which text lines are extracted by dynamically cutting the edges using a new hypervolume reduction criterion and a straightness measure. By learning the distance metric in supervised learning on a dataset of pairs of CCs, the proposed algorithm is made robust to handle various documents with multi-skewed and curved text lines. In experiments on a database with 803 unconstrained handwritten Chinese document images containing a total of 8,169 lines, the proposed algorithm achieved a correct rate 98.02% of line detection, and compared favorably to other competitive algorithms.     

基于深度学习模型的遥感图像分割方法

利用遥感图像快速准确地检测地物信息是当前的研究热点。针对遥感图像地表物的传统人工目视解译分割方法效率低下和现有基于深度学习的遥感图像分割算法在复杂场景下准确率不高、背景噪声多的问题，提出一种基于改进的U-net架构与全连接条件随机场的图像分割算法。首先，融合VGG16和U-net构建新的网络模型，以有效提取具有高背景复杂度的遥感图像特征；然后，通过选取适当的激活函数和卷积方式，在提高图像分割准确率的同时显著降低模型预测时间；最后，在保证分割精度的基础上，使用全连接条件随机场进一步优化分割结果，以获得更加细致的分割边缘。在ISPRS提供的标准数据集Potsdam上进行的仿真测试表明，相较于U-net，所提算法的准确率、召回率和均交并比（MIoU）分别提升了15.06个百分点、29.11个百分点和0.3662，平均绝对误差（MAE）降低了0.02892。实验结果验证了该算法具备有效性和鲁棒性，是一种有效的遥感图像地表物提取算法。     

Extracting text from scanned Arabic books: a large-scale benchmark dataset and a fine-tuned Faster-R-CNN model

Datasets of documents in Arabic are urgently needed to promote computer vision and natural language processing research that addresses the specifics of the language. Unfortunately, publicly available Arabic datasets are limited in size and restricted to certain document domains. This paper presents the release of BE-Arabic-9K, a dataset of more than 9000 high-quality scanned images from over 700 Arabic books. Among these, 1500 images have been manually segmented into regions and labeled by their functionality. BE-Arabic-9K includes book pages with a wide variety of complex layouts and page contents, making it suitable for various document layout analysis and text recognition research tasks. The paper also presents a page layout segmentation and text extraction baseline model based on fine-tuned Faster R-CNN structure (FFRA). This baseline model yields cross-validation results with an average accuracy of 99.4% and F1 score of 99.1% for text versus non-text block classification on 1500 annotated images of BE-Arabic-9K. These results are remarkably better than those of the state-of-the-art Arabic book page segmentation system ECDP. FFRA also outperforms three other prior systems when tested on a competition benchmark dataset, making it an outstanding baseline model to challenge.

     

深度学习单目深度估计研究进展

单目深度估计是从单幅图像中获取场景深度信息的重要技术,在智能汽车和机器人定位等领域应用广泛,具有重要的研究价值。随着深度学习技术的发展,涌现出许多基于深度学习的单目深度估计研究,单目深度估计性能也取得了很大进展。本文按照单目深度估计模型采用的训练数据的类型,从3个方面综述了近年来基于深度学习的单目深度估计方法:基于单图像训练的模型、基于多图像训练的模型和基于辅助信息优化训练的单目深度估计模型。同时,本文在综述了单目深度估计研究常用数据集和性能指标基础上,对经典的单目深度估计模型进行了性能比较分析。以单幅图像作为训练数据的模型具有网络结构简单的特点,但泛化性能较差。采用多图像训练的深度估计网络有更强的泛化性,但网络的参数量大、网络收敛速度慢、训练耗时长。引入辅助信息的深度估计网络的深度估计精度得到了进一步提升,但辅助信息的引入会造成网络结构复杂、收敛速度慢等问题。单目深度估计研究还存在许多的难题和挑战。利用多图像输入中包含的潜在信息和特定领域的约束信息,来提高单目深度估计的性能,逐渐成为了单目深度估计研究的趋势。     

基于HOG和E-SVM的服装图像联合分割算法

针对目前服装图像分割准确率低的问题,提出一种基于HOG特征和E-SVM分类器的服装图像联合分割算法。该算法具体可分为三个迭代的步骤：超像素组合、E-SVM分类器训练、分割传播,并用到辅助数据集。将用户输入的图像结合辅助服装集进行超像素分割,并利用分割传播方法将超像素组合成多个区域。利用分割效果积极的区域的HOG信息训练E-SVM分类器。通过E-SVM分类器以及分割传播方法将输入的图像中的服装分割出来。实验结果表明,该方法能够高准确率地分割出服装图像。     

基于FCN的图像中文字目标语义分割

本文提出一种基于全卷积神经网络的图像中文字目标语义分割算法和一种新的数据集制作与增广方法. 该算法首先采用改进全卷积神经网络对图像中的文字目标进行初步分割, 然后利用大津法进行二值化处理, 划分出目标的大致区域, 最后用全连接条件随机场算法进行修正, 得到最终结果. 该算法在测试集上准确率为85.7%, 速度为0.181秒/幅, 为图像目标区域的进一步分析做准备.     

基于连通域特征的维吾尔手写文本行分割

针对维吾尔文手写体文本中行分割问题,基于连通域大小将图像中文字分为三类,提出了自适应涂抹细化算法,对主体文本行进行定位;并对第三类连通域中相邻两文本行间粘连的字符进行切割;此外,利用重心范围内的邻域搜索算法,解决了剩余笔画的文本行归附问题。实验结果表明,该方法与常见的水平投影法,分段投影法,及涂抹方法相比具有更好的分割效果。