Explaining an image with missing or non-existent objects is known as object bias (hallucination) in image captioning. This behaviour is quite common in the state-of-the-art captioning models which is not desirable by humans. To decrease the object hallucination in captioning, we propose three simple yet efficient training augmentation method for sentences which requires no new training data or increase in the model size. By extensive analysis, we show that the proposed methods can significantly diminish our models' object bias on hallucination metrics. Moreover, we experimentally demonstrate that our methods decrease the dependency on the visual features. All of our code, configuration files and model weights will be made public.
This work addresses the problem of Question Answering (QA) on handwritten document collections. Unlike typical QA and Visual Question Answering (VQA) formulations where the answer is a short text, we aim to locate a document snippet where the answer lies. The proposed approach works without recognizing the text in the documents. We argue that the recognition-free approach is suitable for handwritten documents and historical collections where robust text recognition is often difficult. At the same time, for human users, document image snippets containing answers act as a valid alternative to textual answers. The proposed approach uses an off-the-shelf deep embedding network which can project both textual words and word images into a common sub-space. This embedding bridges the textual and visual domains and helps us retrieve document snippets that potentially answer a question. We evaluate results of the proposed approach on two new datasets: (i) HW-SQuAD: a synthetic, handwritten document image counterpart of SQuAD1.0 dataset and (ii) BenthamQA: a smaller set of QA pairs defined on documents from the popular Bentham manuscripts collection. We also present a thorough analysis of the proposed recognition-free approach compared to a recognition-based approach which uses text recognized from the images using an OCR. Datasets presented in this work are available to download at docvqa.org
Low resource Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is a hard problem due to the scarce annotated data and the very limited linguistic information (dictionaries and language models). This appears, for example, in the case of historical ciphered manuscripts, which are usually written with invented alphabets to hide the content. Thus, in this paper we address this problem through a data generation technique based on Bayesian Program Learning (BPL). Contrary to traditional generation approaches, which require a huge amount of annotated images, our method is able to generate human-like handwriting using only one sample of each symbol from the desired alphabet. After generating symbols, we create synthetic lines to train state-of-the-art HTR architectures in a segmentation free fashion. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were carried out and confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving competitive results compared to the usage of real annotated data.
Current tasks and methods in Document Understanding aims to process documents as single elements. However, documents are usually organized in collections (historical records, purchase invoices), that provide context useful for their interpretation. To address this problem, we introduce Document Collection Visual Question Answering (DocCVQA) a new dataset and related task, where questions are posed over a whole collection of document images and the goal is not only to provide the answer to the given question, but also to retrieve the set of documents that contain the information needed to infer the answer. Along with the dataset we propose a new evaluation metric and baselines which provide further insights to the new dataset and task.
Infographics are documents designed to effectively communicate information using a combination of textual, graphical and visual elements. In this work, we explore the automatic understanding of infographic images by using Visual Question Answering technique.To this end, we present InfographicVQA, a new dataset that comprises a diverse collection of infographics along with natural language questions and answers annotations. The collected questions require methods to jointly reason over the document layout, textual content, graphical elements, and data visualizations. We curate the dataset with emphasis on questions that require elementary reasoning and basic arithmetic skills. Finally, we evaluate two strong baselines based on state of the art multi-modal VQA models, and establish baseline performance for the new task. The dataset, code and leaderboard will be made available at http://docvqa.org
Scanned receipts OCR and key information extraction (SROIE) represent the processeses of recognizing text from scanned receipts and extracting key texts from them and save the extracted tests to structured documents. SROIE plays critical roles for many document analysis applications and holds great commercial potentials, but very little research works and advances have been published in this area. In recognition of the technical challenges, importance and huge commercial potentials of SROIE, we organized the ICDAR 2019 competition on SROIE. In this competition, we set up three tasks, namely, Scanned Receipt Text Localisation (Task 1), Scanned Receipt OCR (Task 2) and Key Information Extraction from Scanned Receipts (Task 3). A new dataset with 1000 whole scanned receipt images and annotations is created for the competition. In this report we will presents the motivation, competition datasets, task definition, evaluation protocol, submission statistics, performance of submitted methods and results analysis.
Recent models for cross-modal retrieval have benefited from an increasingly rich understanding of visual scenes, afforded by scene graphs and object interactions to mention a few. This has resulted in an improved matching between the visual representation of an image and the textual representation of its caption. Yet, current visual representations overlook a key aspect: the text appearing in images, which may contain crucial information for retrieval. In this paper, we first propose a new dataset that allows exploration of cross-modal retrieval where images contain scene-text instances. Then, armed with this dataset, we describe several approaches which leverage scene text, including a better scene-text aware cross-modal retrieval method which uses specialized representations for text from the captions and text from the visual scene, and reconcile them in a common embedding space. Extensive experiments confirm that cross-modal retrieval approaches benefit from scene text and highlight interesting research questions worth exploring further. Dataset and code are available at http://europe.naverlabs.com/stacmr
Scene text instances found in natural images carry explicit semantic information that can provide important cues to solve a wide array of computer vision problems. In this paper, we focus on leveraging multi-modal content in the form of visual and textual cues to tackle the task of fine-grained image classification and retrieval. First, we obtain the text instances from images by employing a text reading system. Then, we combine textual features with salient image regions to exploit the complementary information carried by the two sources. Specifically, we employ a Graph Convolutional Network to perform multi-modal reasoning and obtain relationship-enhanced features by learning a common semantic space between salient objects and text found in an image. By obtaining an enhanced set of visual and textual features, the proposed model greatly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art in two different tasks, fine-grained classification and image retrieval in the Con-Text and Drink Bottle datasets.
This paper presents results of Document Visual Question Answering Challenge organized as part of "Text and Documents in the Deep Learning Era" workshop, in CVPR 2020. The challenge introduces a new problem - Visual Question Answering on document images. The challenge comprised two tasks. The first task concerns with asking questions on a single document image. On the other hand, the second task is set as a retrieval task where the question is posed over a collection of images. For the task 1 a new dataset is introduced comprising 50,000 questions-answer(s) pairs defined over 12,767 document images. For task 2 another dataset has been created comprising 20 questions over 14,362 document images which share the same document template.
Image to image translation aims to learn a mapping that transforms an image from one visual domain to another. Recent works assume that images descriptors can be disentangled into a domain-invariant content representation and a domain-specific style representation. Thus, translation models seek to preserve the content of source images while changing the style to a target visual domain. However, synthesizing new images is extremely challenging especially in multi-domain translations, as the network has to compose content and style to generate reliable and diverse images in multiple domains. In this paper we propose the use of an image retrieval system to assist the image-to-image translation task. First, we train an image-to-image translation model to map images to multiple domains. Then, we train an image retrieval model using real and generated images to find images similar to a query one in content but in a different domain. Finally, we exploit the image retrieval system to fine-tune the image-to-image translation model and generate higher quality images. Our experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed solution and highlight the contribution of the retrieval network, which can benefit from additional unlabeled data and help image-to-image translation models in the presence of scarce data.