Textline detection in natural images has been an important problem and researchers have attempted to address this problem by grouping connected components (CCs) into clusters corresponding to textlines. However, developing bottom-up rules that work for multiorientation and/or multiscript textlines is not a simple task. In order to address this problem, we propose a framework that incorporates projection profile analysis (PPA) into the CC-based approach. Specifically, we build a graph of CCs and recursively partition the graph into subgraphs, until textline structures are detected by PPA. Although PPA has been a common technique in document image processing, it was developed for scanned documents, and we also propose a method to compute projection profiles for CCs. Experimental results show that our method is efficient and achieves better or comparable performance on conventional datasets (ICDAR 2011/2013 and MSRA-TD500), and shows promising results on a challenging dataset (ICDAR 2015 incidental text localization dataset).
A skew-estimation method using straight lines in document images is presented. Unlike conventional approaches exploiting the properties of text, we formulate the skew-estimation problem as an estimation task using straight lines in images and focus on robust and accurate line detection. To be precise, we adopt a block-based edge detector followed by a progressive line detector to take clues from a variety of sources such as text lines, boundaries of figures/tables, vertical/horizontal separators, and boundaries of textblocks. Extensive experiments on the datasets of skewed images and competition results reveal that the proposed method works robustly and yields accurate skew-estimation results.
Conventional image stitching methods were developed under the assumption or condition that (1) the optical center of a camera is fixed (fixed-optical-center case) or (2) the camera captures a plane target (plane-target case). Hence, users should know or test which condition is more appropriate for the given set of images and then select a right algorithm or try multiple stitching algorithms. We propose a unified framework for the image stitching and rectification problem, which can handle both cases in the same framework. To be precise, we model each camera pose with six parameters (three for the rotation and three for the translation) and develop a cost function that reflects the registration errors on a reference plane. The designed cost function is effectively minimized via the Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm. For the given set of images, when it is found that the relative camera motions between the images are large, the proposed method performs rectification of images and then composition using the rectified images; otherwise, the algorithm simply builds a visually pleasing result by selecting a viewpoint. Experimental results on synthetic and real images show that our method successfully performs stitching and metric rectification.
When the horizon or long edges are skewed in photos, they may seem unstable unless they are artistic intentions, and hence we may wish to correct the skews. For the skew correction of faint as well as strong horizons, we propose a skew estimation method for natural images. We first apply a long-block-based edge detector that can construct edge maps even when the edge is faint and/or background is cluttered. We also propose a robust line-detection method that uses the generated edge map, based on progressive probabilistic Hough transform followed by refinement steps. For each of the detected lines, we define their weight and estimate the image skew based on the weighted votes from the lines. Since all the pixels in the long-blocks are used for the edge-map construction, the proposed method can find noisy or faint lines while rejecting curved or short lines. Experimental results show that the first salient angle corresponds with the image skew in most cases, and the skews are successfully corrected.
This paper proposes a new colorization method based on the chrominance blending. The weights for the blending are computed by using the random walker algorithm, which is a soft segmentation technique that provides sharp probability transition on object boundaries. As a result, the proposed method reduces color bleeding and provides improved colorization performances compared to conventional ones.
We propose a new method that classifies wafer images according to their defect types for automatic defect classification in semiconductor fabrication processes. Conventional image classifiers using global properties cannot be used in this problem, because the defects usually occupy very small regions in the images. Hence, the defects should first be segmented, and the shape of the segment and the features extracted from the region are used for classification. In other words, we need to develop a classification-after-segmentation approach for the use of features from the small regions corresponding to the defects. However, the segmentation of scratch defects is not easy due to the shrinking bias problem when using conventional methods. We propose a new Markov random field-based method for the segmentation of wafer images. Then we design an AdaBoost-based classifier that uses the features extracted from the segmented local regions.
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