Abstract

n this paper, we introduce the cartoon faces in the wild (IIIT-CFW) database and associated problems. This database contains 8,928 annotated images of cartoon faces of 100 public figures. It will be useful in conducting research on spectrum of problems associated with cartoon understanding. Note that to our knowledge, such realistic and large databases of cartoon faces are not available in the literature.

Abstract

We address the problem of predicting similarity between a pair of handwritten document images written by potentially different individuals. This has applications related to matching and mining in image collections containing handwritten content. A similarity score is computed by detecting patterns of text re-usages between document images irrespective of the minor variations in word morphology, word ordering, layout and paraphrasing of the content. Our method does not depend on an accurate segmentation of words and lines. We formulate the document matching problem as a structured comparison of the word distributions across two document images. To match two word images, we propose a convolutional neural network (cnn) based feature descriptor. Performance of this representation surpasses the state-of-the-art on handwritten word spotting. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of our …

Abstract

In multi-instance data, every object is a bag that contains multiple elements or instances. Each bag may be assigned to one or more classes, such that it has at least one instance corresponding to every assigned class. However, since the annotations are at bag-level, there is no direct association between the instances within a bag and the assigned class labels, hence making the problem significantly challenging. While existing methods have mostly focused on Bag-to-Bag or Class-to-Bag distances, in this paper, we address the multiple instance learning problem using a novel Bag-to-Class distance measure. This is based on two observations:(a) existence of outliers is natural in multi-instance data, and (b) there may exist multiple instances within a bag that belong to a particular class. In order to address these, in the proposed distance measure (a) we employ L1-distance that brings robustness against outliers …

Abstract

Generating synthetic images is an art which emulates the natural process of image generation in a closest possible manner. In this work, we exploit such a framework for data generation in handwritten domain. We render synthetic data using open source fonts and incorporate data augmentation schemes. As part of this work, we release 9M synthetic handwritten word image corpus which could be useful for training deep network architectures and advancing the performance in handwritten word spotting and recognition tasks.

Abstract

Robotic manipulation of objects in clutter remains a challenging problem to date. The challenge is posed by various levels of complexity involved in interaction among objects. Understanding these semantic interactions among different objects is important to manipulate in complex settings. It can play a significant role in extending the scope of manipulation to cluttered environment involving generic objects, and both direct and indirect physical contact. In our work, we aim at learning semantic interaction among objects of generic shapes and sizes lying in clutter involving physical contact. We infer three types of support relationships: “support from below”, “support from side”, and “containment”. Subsequently, the learned semantic interaction or support relationship is used to derive a sequence or order in which the objects surrounding the object of interest should be removed without causing damage to the …

Abstract

Typical retrieval systems have three requirements: a) Accurate retrieval, ie, the method should have high precision, b) Diverse retrieval, ie, the obtained set of samples should be diverse, and c) Retrieval time should be small. However, most of the existing methods address only one or two of the above mentioned requirements. In this work, we present a method based on randomized locality sensitive hashing which tries to address all of the above requirements simultaneously. While earlier hashing-based approaches considered approximate retrieval to be acceptable only for the sake of efficiency, we argue that one can further exploit approximate retrieval to provide impressive trade-offs between accuracy and diversity. We also extend our method to the problem of multi-label prediction, where the goal is to output a diverse and accurate set of labels for a given document in real-time. Finally, we present empirical …

Abstract

In Indian scenario, a document analysis system has to support multiple languages at the same time. With emerging multilingualism in urban India, often bilingual, trilingual or even more languages need to be supported. This demands development of a multilingual OCR system which can work seamlessly across Indic scripts. In our approach the script is identified at word level, prior to the recognition of the word. An end-to-end RNN based architecture which can detect the script and recognize the text in a segmentation-free manner is proposed for this purpose. We demonstrate the approach for 12 Indian languages and English. It is observed that, even with the similar architecture, performance on Indian languages are poorer compared to English. We investigate this further. Our approach is evaluated on a large corpus comprising of thousands of pages. The Hindi OCR is compared with other popular OCRs for the …

Abstract

We present an approach for automatically identifying the script of the text localized in the scene images. Our approach is inspired by the advancements in mid-level features. We represent the text images using mid-level features which are pooled from densely computed local features. Once text images are represented using the proposed mid-level feature representation, we use an off-the-shelf classifier to identify the script of the text image. Our approach is efficient and requires very less labeled data. We evaluate the performance of our method on a recently introduced CVSI dataset, demonstrating that the proposed approach can correctly identify script of 96.70% of the text images. In addition, we also introduce and benchmark a more challenging Indian Language Scene Text (ILST) dataset for evaluating the performance of our method.

Abstract

Recognizing scene text is a challenging problem, even more so than the recognition of scanned documents. This problem has gained significant attention from the computer vision community in recent years, and several methods based on energy minimization frameworks and deep learning approaches have been proposed. In this work, we focus on the energy minimization framework and propose a model that exploits both bottom-up and top-down cues for recognizing cropped words extracted from street images. The bottom-up cues are derived from individual character detections from an image. We build a conditional random field model on these detections to jointly model the strength of the detections and the interactions between them. These interactions are top-down cues obtained from a lexicon-based prior, i.e., language statistics. The optimal word represented by the text image is obtained by minimizing the …

Abstract

Accurately annotated large video data is critical for the development of reliable surveillance and automotive related vision solutions. In this work, we propose an efficient and yet accurate annotation scheme for objects in videos (pedestrians in this case) with minimal supervision. We annotate objects with tight bounding boxes. We propagate the annotations across the frames with a self training based approach. An energy minimization scheme for the segmentation is the central component of our method. Unlike the popular grab cut like segmentation schemes, we demand minimal user intervention. Since our annotation is built on an accurate segmentation, our bounding boxes are tight. We validate the performance of our approach on multiple publicly available datasets.