Offline Handwritten Mathematical Recognition using Adversarial Learning and Transformers

Offline Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER) is a major area in the field of mathematical expression recognition. Offline HMER is often viewed as a much harder problem as compared to online HMER due to a lack of temporal information and variability in writing style. In this paper, we purpose a encoder-decoder model that uses paired adversarial learning. Semantic-invariant features are extracted from handwritten mathematical expression images and their printed mathematical expression counterpart in the encoder. Learning of semantic-invariant features combined with the DenseNet encoder and transformer decoder, helped us to improve the expression rate from previous studies. Evaluated on the CROHME dataset, we have been able to improve latest CROHME 2019 test set results by 4% approx.

Newton methods based convolution neural networks using parallel processing

Training of convolutional neural networks is a high dimensional and a non-convex optimization problem. At present, it is inefficient in situations where parametric learning rates can not be confidently set. Some past works have introduced Newton methods for training deep neural networks. Newton methods for convolutional neural networks involve complicated operations. Finding the Hessian matrix in second-order methods becomes very complex as we mainly use the finite differences method with the image data. Newton methods for convolutional neural networks deals with this by using the sub-sampled Hessian Newton methods. In this paper, we have used the complete data instead of the sub-sampled methods that only handle partial data at a time. Further, we have used parallel processing instead of serial processing in mini-batch computations. The results obtained using parallel processing in this study, outperform the time taken by the previous approach.