Exploring text-to-image generation for historical document image retrieval

Attribute-based document image retrieval (ABDIR) was recently proposed as an alternative to query-by-example (QBE) searches, the dominant document image retrieval (DIR) paradigm. One drawback of QBE searches is that they require sample query documents on hand that may not be available. ABDIR aims to offer users a flexible way to retrieve document images based on memorable visual features of document contents, describing document images with combinations of visual attributes determined via convolutional neural network (CNN)-based binary classifiers. We present an exploratory study of the use of generative AI to bridge the gap between QBE and ABDIR, focusing on historical documents as a use case for their diversity and uniqueness in visual features. We hypothesize that text-to-image (T2I) generation can be leveraged to create query document images using text prompts based on ABDIR-like attributes. We propose T2I-QBE, which uses Leonardo.Ai as the T2I generator with prompts that include a rough description of the desired document type and a list of the desired ABDIR-style attributes. This creates query images that are then used within the traditional QBE paradigm, which compares CNN-extracted query features to those of the document images in the dataset to retrieve the most relevant documents. Experiments on the HisIR19 dataset of historical documents confirm our hypothesis and suggest that T2I-QBE is a viable option for historical document image retrieval. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first attempt at utilizing T2I generation for DIR.

Symbol Spotting on Digital Architectural Floor Plans Using a Deep Learning-based Framework

This papers focuses on symbol spotting on real-world digital architectural floor plans with a deep learning (DL)-based framework. Traditional on-the-fly symbol spotting methods are unable to address the semantic challenge of graphical notation variability, i.e. low intra-class symbol similarity, an issue that is particularly important in architectural floor plan analysis. The presence of occlusion and clutter, characteristic of real-world plans, along with a varying graphical symbol complexity from almost trivial to highly complex, also pose challenges to existing spotting methods. In this paper, we address all of the above issues by leveraging recent advances in DL and adapting an object detection framework based on the You-Only-Look-Once (YOLO) architecture. We propose a training strategy based on tiles, avoiding many issues particular to DL-based object detection networks related to the relative small size of symbols compared to entire floor plans, aspect ratios, and data augmentation. Experiments on real-world floor plans demonstrate that our method successfully detects architectural symbols with low intra-class similarity and of variable graphical complexity, even in the presence of heavy occlusion and clutter. Additional experiments on the public SESYD dataset confirm that our proposed approach can deal with various degradation and noise levels and outperforms other symbol spotting methods.

A Deep Learning-based Framework for the Detection of Schools of Herring in Echograms

Tracking the abundance of underwater species is crucial for understanding the effects of climate change on marine ecosystems. Biologists typically monitor underwater sites with echosounders and visualize data as 2D images (echograms); they interpret these data manually or semi-automatically, which is time-consuming and prone to inconsistencies. This paper proposes a deep learning framework for the automatic detection of schools of herring from echograms. Experiments demonstrated that our approach outperforms a traditional machine learning algorithm using hand-crafted features. Our framework could easily be expanded to detect more species of interest to sustainable fisheries.