Posted by eduardovalle on Thursday, July 23, 2009
I am glad to announce that I’ve got a post-doctoral position at the Computing Institute of the State University of Campinas, where I’ll be supervised by Prof. Ricardo Torres.
Prof. Torres and I have met last December at Cergy Pontoise, France, on the occasion of his visit at the ETIS Labs and my research internship at the LIP6 Labs. We have quickly found common research interests and decided to submit a request for a post-doctoral scholarship to FAPESP, one of the biggest scientific sponsoring foundations in Brazil. We received the acceptance a few days ago.
During this new internship I will try to broaden some of the results of my thesis, and continue to work on scalability issues of Machine Learning and Information Retrieval. And I will continue to cooperate with my French colleagues (whom I am visiting on September, by the way ), and with my current team, at the Federal University of Minas Gerais.
I am looking forward to start it !
Posted in career | Tagged: cooperation, FAPESP, post-doc, Ricardo Torres, UNICAMP, work | Leave a Comment »
Posted by eduardovalle on Sunday, July 5, 2009
I had two short papers accepted on DocEng 2009.
One, co-authored with my French partners Dr. David Picard and Prof. Matthieu Cord, is about the difficult problem of enforcing geometric consistency in vote-counting based CBIR when there are too many outliers — a situation we encounter routinely in our iTowns project. Here’s the title and abstract:
Geometric Consistency Checking for Local-Descriptor Based Document Retrieval — In this paper, we evaluate different geometric consistency schemes, which can be used in tandem with an efficient architecture, based on voting and local descriptors, to retrieve multimedia documents. In many contexts the geometric consistency enforcement is essential to boost the retrieval performance. Our empirical results show however, that geometric consistency alone is unable to guarantee high-quality results in databases that contain too many non-discriminating descriptors.
The other, co-authored with my Brazilian colleagues Flávio Bertholdo and Prof. Arnaldo Araújo, proposes a new method for contrast enhancement in degraded historical documents, which takes into account the structure of the the document:
Layout-Aware Limiarization for Readability Enhancement of Degraded Historical Documents — In this paper we propose a technique of limiarization (also known as thresholding or binarization) tailored to improve the readability of degraded historical documents. Limiarization is a simple image processing technique, which is employed in many complex tasks like image compression, object segmentation and character recognition. The technique also finds applications on itself: since it results in a high-contrast image, in which the foreground is clearly separated from the background, it can greatly improve the readability of a document, provided that other attributes (like character shape) do not suffer. Our technique exploits statistical characteristics of textual documents and applies both global and local thresholding. Under visual inspection on experiments made in a collection of severely degraded historical documents, it compares favorably with the state of the art.
DocEng 2009 will be held in Munich, Germany on September 15–18.
EDIT 23/07: The preprints are now available in my publications page.
Posted in publications, science | Tagged: paper, doceng, publication, cultural heritage, cbir, limiarization, iTowns, geometric consistency | Leave a Comment »
