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.     

An over-segmentation method for single-touching Chinese handwriting with learning-based filtering

The segmentation of touching characters is still a challenging task, posing a bottleneck for offline Chinese handwriting recognition. In this paper, we propose an effective over-segmentation method with learning-based filtering using geometric features for single-touching Chinese handwriting. First, we detect candidate cuts by skeleton and contour analysis to guarantee a high recall rate of character separation. A filter is designed by supervised learning and used to prune implausible cuts to improve the precision. Since the segmentation rules and features are independent of the string length, the proposed method can deal with touching strings with more than two characters. The proposed method is evaluated on both the character segmentation task and the text line recognition task. The results on two large databases demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in dealing with single-touching Chinese handwriting.     

基于Viterbi 算法的粘连断裂印刷体数字行切分识别方法

粘连断裂字符行的切分识别，是很多OCR 实际应用中存在的主要困难之一. 本文针对粘连断裂的印刷体数字行，提出了一种基于Viterbi 算法的切分识别方案，该方案采用两次切分识别的层次型结构. 在第二次切分识别过程中，首先，在候选切分点区域，结合灰度图像与二值轮廓信息，采用基于Viterbi 算法搜索的非直线路径进行切分，得到有效的切分路径；然后，结合分类器输出的可信度，采用Viterbi 算法来合并前面得到的候选切分图像块，进行动态切分与识别. 实际的金融票据识别系统实验表明，本文提出的印刷体数字行切分识别方法能够较好的克服字符行的粘连与断裂情况，提高了识别系统的识别率和鲁棒性.     

A graph-based approach for segmenting touching lines in historical handwritten documents

Text line segmentation in handwritten documents is an important task in the recognition of historical documents. Handwritten document images contain text lines with multiple orientations, touching and overlapping characters between consecutive text lines and different document structures, making line segmentation a difficult task. In this paper, we present a new approach for handwritten text line segmentation solving the problems of touching components, curvilinear text lines and horizontally overlapping components. The proposed algorithm formulates line segmentation as finding the central path in the area between two consecutive lines. This is solved as a graph traversal problem. A graph is constructed using the skeleton of the image. Then, a path-finding algorithm is used to find the optimum path between text lines. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on a comprehensive dataset consisting of five databases: ICDAR2009, ICDAR2013, UMD, the George Washington and the Barcelona Marriages Database. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art considering the different types and difficulties of the benchmarking data.     

Coupled snakelets for curled text-line segmentation from warped document images

Camera-captured, warped document images usually contain curled text-lines because of distortions caused by camera perspective view and page curl. Warped document images can be transformed into planar document images for improving optical character recognition accuracy and human readability using monocular dewarping techniques. Curled text-lines segmentation is a crucial initial step for most of the monocular dewarping techniques. Existing curled text-line segmentation approaches are sensitive to geometric and perspective distortions. In this paper, we introduce a novel curled text-line segmentation algorithm by adapting active contour (snake). Our algorithm performs text-line segmentation by estimating pairs of x-line and baseline. It estimates a local pair of x-line and baseline on each connected component by jointly tracing top and bottom points of neighboring connected components, and finally each group of overlapping pairs is considered as a segmented text-line. Our algorithm has achieved curled text-line segmentation accuracy of above 95% on the DFKI-I (CBDAR 2007 dewarping contest) dataset, which is significantly better than previously reported results on this dataset.     

一种新的粘连字符图像分割方法

针对监控画面采样图像中数字的自动识别问题,提出一种新的粘连字符图像分割方法。该方法以预处理后二值图像的连通状况来判定字符粘连的存在,并对粘连字符图像采用上下轮廓极值法确定候选粘连分割点,以双向最短路径确定合适的图像分割线路。仿真实验表明,该方法能有效解决粘连字符图像的分割问题。     

Filtering segmentation cuts for digit string recognition

In this paper we propose a method to evaluate segmentation cuts for handwritten touching digits. The idea of this method is to work as a filter in segmentation-based recognition system. This kind of system usually rely on over-segmentation methods, where several segmentation hypotheses are created for each touching group of digits and then assessed by a general-purpose classifier. The novelty of the proposed methodology lies in the fact that unnecessary segmentation cuts can be identified without any attempt of classification by a general-purpose classifier, reducing the number of paths in a segmentation graph, what can consequently lead to a reduction in computational cost. An cost-based approach using ROC (receiver operating characteristics) was deployed to optimize the filter. Experimental results show that the filter can eliminate up to 83% of the unnecessary segmentation hypothesis and increase the overall performance of the system.     

A method for combining complementary techniques for document image segmentation

Image segmentation is a major task of handwritten document image processing. Many of the proposed techniques for image segmentation are complementary in the sense that each of them using a different approach can solve different difficult problems such as overlapping, touching components, influence of author or font style etc. In this paper, a combination method of different segmentation techniques is presented. Our goal is to exploit the segmentation results of complementary techniques and specific features of the initial image so as to generate improved segmentation results. Experimental results on line segmentation methods for handwritten documents demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed combination method.     

面向脑核磁共振识别运动任务的门控循环单元方法

目的 在脑科学领域,已有研究借助脑功能核磁共振影像数据(functional magnetic resonance imaging,fMRI)探索和区分人类大脑在不同运动任务下的状态,然而传统方法没有充分利用fMRI数据的时序特性。对此,本文提出基于fMRI数据计算的全脑脑区时间信号(time course,TC)的门控循环单元(gated recurrent unit,GRU)方法(TC-GRU)进行运动任务分类。方法 基于HCP(human connectome project)数据集中的100个健康被试者在5种运动任务中分两轮采集的1 000条fMRI数据,对每种运动任务计算每个被试者在各脑区(共360个脑区)的时间信号;使用10折交叉验证方案基于训练集和验证集训练TC-GRU模型,并用构建好的模型对测试集进行测试,考察其对5种运动任务的分类能力,其中TC-GRU在各时刻的输入特征为全脑脑区在对应时刻的TC信号幅值,通过这样的方式提取全脑脑区在整个时间段的时序特征。同时,为了展示使用TC-GRU模型可挖掘fMRI数据中更丰富的信息,设计了多个对比实验进行比较,利用长短期记忆网络(...     

Search based constrained test case selection using execution effort

Software testing is essential to guarantee high quality products. However, it is a very expensive activity, particularly when manually performed. One way to cut down costs is by reducing the input test suites, which are usually large in order to fully satisfy the test goals. Yet, since large test suites usually contain redundancies (i.e., two or more test cases (TC) covering the same requirement/piece of code), it is possible to reduce them in order to respect time/people constraints without severely compromising coverage. In this light, we formulated the TC selection problem as a constrained search based optimization task, using requirements coverage as the fitness function to be maximized (quality of the resultant suite), and the execution effort (time) of the selected TCs as a constraint in the search process. Our work is based on the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm, which is simple and efficient when compared to other widespread search techniques. Despite that, besides our previous works, we did not find any other proposals using PSO for TC selection, neither we found solutions treating this task as a constrained optimization problem. We implemented a Binary Constrained PSO (BCPSO) for functional TC selection, and two hybrid algorithms integrating BCPSO with local search mechanisms, in order to refine the solutions provided by BCPSO. These algorithms were evaluated using two different real-world test suites of functional TCs related to the mobile devices domain. In the performed experiments, the BCPSO obtained promising results for the optimization tasks considered. Also, the hybrid algorithms obtained statistically better results than the individual search techniques.     

Interactive image segmentation with a regression based ensemble learning paradigm

To achieve fine segmentation of complex natural images, people often resort to an interactive segmentation paradigm, since fully automatic methods often fail to obtain a result consistent with the ground truth. However, when the foreground and background share some similar areas in color, the fine segmentation result of conventional interactive methods usually relies on the increase of manual labels. This paper presents a novel interactive image segmentation method via a regression-based ensemble model with semi-supervised learning. The task is formulated as a non-linear problem integrating two complementary spline regressors and strengthening the robustness of each regressor via semi-supervised learning. First, two spline regressors with a complementary nature are constructed based on multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) and smooth thin plate spline regression (TPSR). Then, a regressor boosting method based on a clustering hypothesis and semi-supervised learning is proposed to assist the training of MARS and TPSR by using the region segmentation information contained in unlabeled pixels. Next, a support vector regression (SVR) based decision fusion model is adopted to integrate the results of MARS and TPSR. Finally, the GraphCut is introduced and combined with the SVR ensemble results to achieve image segmentation. Extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets of BSDS500 and Pascal VOC have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method, and the comparison with experiment results has validated that the proposed method is comparable with the state-of-the-art methods for interactive natural image segmentation.     

一种有效的手写汉字多步分割方法

在字符识别系统中,字符的有效分割是识别的关键。针对手写汉字字间距及字内距无规则可循,字符间极易发生粘连、交错等现象,提出一种多步分割方法。该方法首先利用Viterbi算法将原字符串切分成互不连通的分割块,使非粘连汉字、交错汉字得到正确分割;对于其中宽度较大存在粘连字符的分割块,从候选分割点入手,用非线性分割路径将粘连部分分开;最后再应用A*算法找到全局最佳分割位置,使过分割的字符得到完整合并。实验结果表明,该方法对于手写汉字的分割是可行、有效的。     

条件颗粒分割方法研究

图像中两个物体的接触关系根据粒径可分为未接触、不同粒度物体的接触和同粒度物体的接触3种，接触物体根据接触部分的大小又可分为强接触、中等接触和弱接触。对接触物体的保形分割应该是使分割后物体恢复原来的形态，鉴于流域分割、测地重建等算法在分割接触物体时，不但对物体形态产生破坏和受干扰因素多，而且对于计算接触面积大小的问题，以上算法也不易实现，为此，提出了条件颗粒分割方法，即在数学形态学开运算过程中，对标定区域腐蚀后，不再做膨胀运算，就直接在保形的基础上，对不同粒度的物体进行分割，而对于同粒度接触的物体，则先通过腐蚀后，再做一次特殊条件颗粒分割来得到小粒度(条带)部分，再进行复原就是目标物体的接触部位。最后，介绍了此算法在岩石颗粒粒度分析及胶结类型划分方面的应用。     

Data-driven decomposition for multi-class classification

This paper presents a new study on a method of designing a multi-class classifier: Data-driven Error Correcting Output Coding (DECOC). DECOC is based on the principle of Error Correcting Output Coding (ECOC), which uses a code matrix to decompose a multi-class problem into multiple binary problems. ECOC for multi-class classification hinges on the design of the code matrix. We propose to explore the distribution of data classes and optimize both the composition and the number of base learners to design an effective and compact code matrix. Two real world applications are studied: (1) the holistic recognition (i.e., recognition without segmentation) of touching handwritten numeral pairs and (2) the classification of cancer tissue types based on microarray gene expression data. The results show that the proposed DECOC is able to deliver competitive accuracy compared with other ECOC methods, using parsimonious base learners than the pairwise coupling (one-vs-one) decomposition scheme. With a rejection scheme defined by a simple robustness measure, high reliabilities of around 98% are achieved in both applications.     

GC-ASM: Synergistic integration of graph-cut and active shape model strategies for medical image segmentation

Image segmentation methods may be classified into two categories: purely image based and model based. Each of these two classes has its own advantages and disadvantages. In this paper, we propose a novel synergistic combination of the image based graph-cut (GC) method with the model based ASM method to arrive at the GC-ASM method for medical image segmentation. A multi-object GC cost function is proposed which effectively integrates the ASM shape information into the GC framework. The proposed method consists of two phases: model building and segmentation. In the model building phase, the ASM model is built and the parameters of the GC are estimated. The segmentation phase consists of two main steps: initialization (recognition) and delineation. For initialization, an automatic method is proposed which estimates the pose (translation, orientation, and scale) of the model, and obtains a rough segmentation result which also provides the shape information for the GC method. For delineation, an iterative GC-ASM algorithm is proposed which performs finer delineation based on the initialization results. The proposed methods are implemented to operate on 2D images and evaluated on clinical chest CT, abdominal CT, and foot MRI data sets. The results show the following: (a) An overall delineation accuracy of TPVF > 96%, FPVF < 0.6% can be achieved via GC-ASM for different objects, modalities, and body regions. (b) GC-ASM improves over ASM in its accuracy and precision to search region. (c) GC-ASM requires far fewer landmarks (about 1/3 of ASM) than ASM. (d) GC-ASM achieves full automation in the segmentation step compared to GC which requires seed specification and improves on the accuracy of GC. (e) One disadvantage of GC-ASM is its increased computational expense owing to the iterative nature of the algorithm.     

基于轮廓特征的印刷公式粘连符号的切分

在印刷体数学公式识别中,不能准确地切分粘连符号是造成识别错误的主要原因之一。针对这种情况,提出了一种基于轮廓特征切分粘连符号的方法。根据轮廓特征及宽高比形成切分路径,然后对粘连字符切分。实验表明,这种方法使识别率得到了明显提高。     

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.     

一种新的货运列车车号分割算法

在对现有的货运列车车号分割算法及相关字符分割算法对比研究的基础上,文中提出并实现了一种新的货运列车车号分割算法。根据上下轮廓特征初步确定车号字符串图像的候选分割位置,然后根据字符尺寸比例和数字的弧特征,对断裂字符进行合并和对粘连字符进行再分割。该方法巧妙地避免了传统的投影分析分割法中处理粘连字符的难题,也避免了噪声对连通域的影响。与传统方法相比,具有较好的鲁棒性,达到了较高的精度和运行效率,为整个车号识别系统的精确性和稳定性提供了保障。