13 – 16 December, 2015
Albert Gordo:
LEWIS: Latent Embeddings for Word Images and their Semantics (co-authored with Jon Almazan, Naila Murray and Florent Perronnin)
Abstract: The goal of this work is to bring semantics into the tasks of text recognition and retrieval in natural images.
Although text recognition and retrieval have received a lot of attention in recent years, previous works have focused on recognizing or retrieving exactly the same word used as a query, without taking the semantics into consideration.
In this paper, we ask the following question: can we predict semantic concepts directly from a word image, without explicitly trying to transcribe the word image or its characters at any point?
For this goal we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) with a weighted ranking loss objective that ensures that the concepts relevant to the query image are ranked ahead of those that are not relevant.
This can also be interpreted as learning a Euclidean space where word images and concepts are jointly embedded.
This model is learned in an end-to-end manner, from image pixels to semantic concepts, using a dataset of synthetically generated word images and concepts mined from a lexical database (WordNet).
Our results show that, despite the complexity of the task, word images and concepts can indeed be associated with a high degree of accuracy.