We propose a high-performance fully convolutional neural network (FCN) for historical document segmentation that is designed to process a single page in one step. The advantage of this model beside its speed is its ability to directly learn from raw pixels instead of using preprocessing steps e. g. feature computation or superpixel generation. We show that this network yields better results than existing methods on different public data sets. For evaluation of this model we introduce a novel metric that is independent of ambiguous ground truth called Foreground Pixel Accuracy (FgPA). This pixel based measure only counts foreground pixels in the binarized page, any background pixel is omitted. The major advantage of this metric is, that it enables researchers to compare different segmentation methods on their ability to successfully segment text or pictures and not on their ability to learn and possibly overfit the peculiarities of an ambiguous hand-made ground truth segmentation.
The field of document analysis of contemporary and historical documents is a challenging problem and has been addressed by many researchers. Recently, algorithms based on CNNs that automatically learn features from the pixels of a page show superior success in this area compared to handcrafted features @cite_4 , @cite_16 .
@cite_16 @cite_4
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This paper presents a new state-of-the-art for document image classification and retrieval, using features learned by deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In object and scene analysis, deep neural nets are capable of learning a hierarchical chain of abstraction from pixel inputs to concise and descriptive representations. The current work explores this capacity in the realm of document analysis, and confirms that this representation strategy is superior to a variety of popular hand-crafted alternatives. Experiments also show that (i) features extracted from CNNs are robust to compression, (ii) CNNs trained on non-document images transfer well to document analysis tasks, and (iii) enforcing region-specific feature-learning is unnecessary given sufficient training data. This work also makes available a new labelled subset of the IIT-CDIP collection, containing 400,000 document images across 16 categories, useful for training new CNNs for document analysis. This paper presents a page segmentation method for handwritten historical document images based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). We consider page segmentation as a pixel labeling problem, i.e., each pixel is classified as one of the predefined classes. Traditional methods in this area rely on hand-crafted features carefully tuned considering prior knowledge. In contrast, we propose to learn features from raw image pixels using a CNN. While many researchers focus on developing deep CNN architectures to solve different problems, we train a simple CNN with only one convolution layer. We show that the simple architecture achieves competitive results against other deep architectures on different public datasets. Experiments also demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method compared to previous methods. In recent years there have been multiple successful attempts tackling document processing problems separately by designing task specific hand-tuned strategies. We argue that the diversity of historical document processing tasks prohibits to solve them one at a time and shows a need for designing generic approaches in order to handle the variability of historical series. In this paper, we address multiple tasks simultaneously such as page extraction, baseline extraction, layout analysis or multiple typologies of illustrations and photograph extraction. We propose an open-source implementation of a CNN-based pixel-wise predictor coupled with task dependent post-processing blocks. We show that a single CNN-architecture can be used across tasks with competitive results. Moreover most of the task-specific post-precessing steps can be decomposed in a small number of simple and standard reusable operations, adding to the flexibility of our approach. Analysis-by-synthesis has been a successful approach for many tasks in computer vision, such as 6D pose estimation of an object in an RGB-D image which is the topic of this work. The idea is to compare the observation with the output of a forward process, such as a rendered image of the object of interest in a particular pose. Due to occlusion or complicated sensor noise, it can be difficult to perform this comparison in a meaningful way. We propose an approach that "learns to compare", while taking these difficulties into account. This is done by describing the posterior density of a particular object pose with a convolutional neural network (CNN) that compares an observed and rendered image. The network is trained with the maximum likelihood paradigm. We observe empirically that the CNN does not specialize to the geometry or appearance of specific objects, and it can be used with objects of vastly different shapes and appearances, and in different backgrounds. Compared to state-of-the-art, we demonstrate a significant improvement on two different datasets which include a total of eleven objects, cluttered background, and heavy occlusion.