Alicia Fornes is performing ground-breaking research in hand-written document analysis at the Computer Vision Center, Barcelona, Spain. So, it’s a great pleasure to welcome her to Beyond the Patterns!

Abstract: Lately, document image analysis and recognition systems have become fundamental for recognizing, searching and extracting information from historical manuscripts, easing the access and indexing of our cultural heritage. However, and even with the recent advances in deep learning, historical handwritten documents are difficult due to the variability in the handwriting styles and the few available labelled data. For this reason, synthetic data generation, domain adaptation or few-shot learning techniques have been proposed for alleviating those problems. This talk will overview some of these techniques, showing examples of their application to textual documents, music scores or enciphered manuscripts, and discussing some of the open challenges.

Short Bio: Dr. Alicia Fornés is a Senior Research Fellow at the Computer Vision Center (CVC) and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). She has more than 100 publications in international conferences and journals. She has participated in many research and technology transfer projects related to the recognition of handwritten documents. She received the IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award in 2017 for outstanding contributions in the recognition of handwriting, text and graphics, with high impact to the field of Digital Humanities. Her research interests include historical document image analysis, handwriting recognition and optical music recognition.

References & Links
Pianola Roll Digitizer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmTryKCM_e8&feature=youtu.be

Document Information Extraction http://dag.cvc.uab.es/infoesposalles/media-gallery/

Historical Social Network http://dag.cvc.uab.es/xarxes/

DECRYPT project: https://de-crypt.org/

J.I.Toledo, S.Dey, A.Fornés, J.Lladós. Handwriting Recognition by Attribute embedding and Recurrent Neural Networks. ICDAR, 2017

L.Kang, P.Riba, M.Villegas, A.Fornes, M.Rusiñol. Candidate fusion: Integrating language modelling into a sequence-to-sequence handwritten word recognition architecture. Pattern Recognition, 2021

Lei Kang, Pau Riba, MarçalRusiñol, Alicia Fornés, Mauricio Villegas. Pay Attention to What You Read: Non-recurrent Handwritten Text-Line Recognition. https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.13044, 2020.

Pau Riba, Andreas Fischer, JosepLladós, Alicia Fornés. Learning Graph Edit Distance by Graph Neural Networks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.07641, 2020.

J.I.Toledo, M. Carbonell, A.Fornés, J.Lladós. Information Extraction from Historical Handwritten Document Images with a Context-aware Neural Model, Pattern Recognition, 2019.

M.Carbonell, A.Fornés, M Villegas, J.Lladós. A Neural Model for Text Localization, Transcription and Named Entity Recognition in Full Pages. Pattern Recognition Letters, 2020.

J.Chen, P.Riba, A.Fornés, J.Mas, J.Lladós, J..M.Pujadas-Mora, Word-Hunter: A GamesourcingExperience to Validate the Transcription of Historical Manuscripts. ICFHR (2018)

A.Baró, P.Riba, J.Calvo-Zaragoza, A.Fornés. From Optical Music Recognition to Handwritten Music Recognition: a Baseline. Pattern Recognition Letters, 2019.

M.Visani, V.C.Kieu, A.Fornés, N.Journet. The ICDAR 2013 Music Scores Competition: Staff Removal. ICDAR, 2013.

L.Kang, M.Rusiñol, A.Fornés, P.Riba, M.Villegas. Unsupervised Adaptation for Synthetic-to-Real Handwritten Word Recognition. Winter Conf. on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2020.

L.Kang, P.Riba, Y.Wang, M.Rusiñol, A.Fornés, M.Villegas. GANwriting: Content-Conditioned Generation of Styled Handwritten Word Images. ECCV, 2020.

L.Kang, P.Riba, M.Rusiñol, A.Fornés, M.Villegas. Distilling Content from Style for Handwritten Word Recognition. International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR), 2020.

J.Chen, M.A.Souibgui, A. Fornes, B.Megyesi. A Web-BasedInteractiveTranscriptionTool forEncryptedManuscripts. HistoCrypt, 2020

M.A.Souibgui, A.Fornés, Y.Kessentini, C.Tudor. A Few-shot Learning Approach for Historical Encoded Manuscript Recognition, International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), 2020.

M.A.Souibgui, A.Bensalah, J.Chen, A.Fornes, M.Waldispühl. Abstract submitted to the International Symposium on Runes and Runic Inscriptions (ISRRI), 20|21

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Music Reference: 
Damiano Baldoni - Thinking of You (Intro)
Damiano Baldoni - Poenia (Outro)