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Handwritten Text Recognition has achieved an impressive performance in public benchmarks. However, due to the high inter- and intra-class variability between handwriting styles, such recognizers need to be trained using huge volumes of manually labeled training data. To alleviate this labor-consuming problem, synthetic data produced with TrueType fonts has been often used in the training loop to gain volume and augment the handwriting style variability. However, there is a significant style bias between synthetic and real data which hinders the improvement of recognition performance. To deal with such limitations, we propose a generative method for handwritten text-line images, which is conditioned on both visual appearance and textual content. Our method is able to produce long text-line samples with diverse handwriting styles. Once properly trained, our method can also be adapted to new target data by only accessing unlabeled text-line images to mimic handwritten styles and produce images with any textual content. Extensive experiments have been done on making use of the generated samples to boost Handwritten Text Recognition performance. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the current state of the art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the problems of word spotting and word recognition on images. In word spotting, the goal is to find all instances of a query word in a dataset of images. In recognition, the goal is to recognize the content of the word image, usually aided by a dictionary or lexicon. We describe an approach in which both word images and text strings are embedded in a common vectorial subspace. This is achieved by a combination of label embedding and attributes learning, and a common subspace regression. In this subspace, images and strings that represent the same word are close together, allowing one to cast recognition and retrieval tasks as a nearest neighbor problem. Contrary to most other existing methods, our representation has a fixed length, is low dimensional, and is very fast to compute and, especially, to compare. We test our approach on four public datasets of both handwritten documents and natural images showing results comparable or better than the state-of-the-art on spotting and recognition tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a circular blurred shape model descriptor to deal with the problem of symbol detection and classification as a particular case of object recognition. The feature extraction is performed by capturing the spatial arrangement of significant object characteristics in a correlogram structure. The shape information from objects is shared among correlogram regions, where a prior blurring degree defines the level of distortion allowed in the symbol, making the descriptor tolerant to irregular deformations. Moreover, the descriptor is rotation invariant by definition. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed descriptor in both the multiclass symbol recognition and symbol detection domains. In order to perform the symbol detection, the descriptors are learned using a cascade of classifiers. In the case of multiclass categorization, the new feature space is learned using a set of binary classifiers which are embedded in an error-correcting output code design. The results over four symbol data sets show the significant improvements of the proposed descriptor compared to the state-of-the-art descriptors. In particular, the results are even more significant in those cases where the symbols suffer from elastic deformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]