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Learning to Rank Words: Optimizing Ranking Metrics for Word Spotting

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Document Analysis and Recognition – ICDAR 2021 (ICDAR 2021)

Abstract

In this paper, we explore and evaluate the use of ranking-based objective functions for learning simultaneously a word string and a word image encoder. We consider retrieval frameworks in which the user expects a retrieval list ranked according to a defined relevance score. In the context of a word spotting problem, the relevance score has been set according to the string edit distance from the query string. We experimentally demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed model on query-by-string word spotting for both, handwritten and real scene word images. We also provide the results for query-by-example word spotting, although it is not the main focus of this work.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress from 1741–1799, Series 2, Letterbook 1, pages 270–279 and 300–309, https://www.loc.gov/collections/george-washington-papers/about-this-collection/.

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Acknowledgment

This work has been partially supported by the Spanish projects RTI2018-095645-B-C21, and FCT-19-15244, and the Catalan projects 2017-SGR-1783, the Culture Department of the Generalitat de Catalunya, and the CERCA Program/Generalitat de Catalunya.

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Correspondence to Pau Riba .

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Riba, P., Molina, A., Gomez, L., Ramos-Terrades, O., Lladós, J. (2021). Learning to Rank Words: Optimizing Ranking Metrics for Word Spotting. In: Lladós, J., Lopresti, D., Uchida, S. (eds) Document Analysis and Recognition – ICDAR 2021. ICDAR 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12822. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86331-9_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86331-9_25

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