Variational dynamic background model for keyword spotting in handwritten documents

Gaurav Kumar; Safwan Wshah; Venu Govindaraju

doi:10.1117/12.2041244

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24 March 2014 Variational dynamic background model for keyword spotting in handwritten documents

Gaurav Kumar, Safwan Wshah, Venu Govindaraju

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Proceedings Volume 9021, Document Recognition and Retrieval XXI; 902104 (2014) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2041244
Event: IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging, 2014, San Francisco, California, United States

Abstract

We propose a bayesian framework for keyword spotting in handwritten documents. This work is an extension to our previous work where we proposed dynamic background model, DBM for keyword spotting that takes into account the local character level scores and global word level scores to learn a logistic regression classifier to separate keywords from non-keywords. In this work, we add a bayesian layer on top of the DBM called the variational dynamic background model, VDBM. The logistic regression classifier uses the sigmoid function to separate keywords from non-keywords. The sigmoid function being neither convex nor concave, exact inference of VDBM becomes intractable. An expectation maximization step is proposed to do approximate inference. The advantage of VDBM over the DBM is multi-fold. Firstly, being bayesian, it prevents over-fitting of data. Secondly, it provides better modeling of data and an improved prediction of unseen data. VDBM is evaluated on the IAM dataset and the results prove that it outperforms our prior work and other state of the art line based word spotting system.

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Gaurav Kumar, Safwan Wshah, and Venu Govindaraju "Variational dynamic background model for keyword spotting in handwritten documents", Proc. SPIE 9021, Document Recognition and Retrieval XXI, 902104 (24 March 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2041244

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