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Generalized Haar-like filters for document analysis : application to word spotting and text extraction from comics

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The presented thesis follows two directions. The first one disposes a technique for text and graphic separation in comics. The second one points out a learning free segmentation free word spotting framework based on the query-by-string problem for manuscript documents. The two approaches are based on human perception characteristics. Indeed, they were inspired by several characteristics of human vision such as the Preattentive processing. These characteristics guide us to introduce two multi scale approaches for two different document analysis tasks which are text extraction from comics and word spotting in manuscript document. These two approaches are based on applying generalized Haar-like filters globally on each document image whatever its type. Describing and detailing the use of such features throughout this thesis, we offer the researches of document image analysis field a new line of research that has to be more explored in future. The two approaches are layout segmentation free and the generalized Haar-like filters are applied globally on the image. Moreover, no binarization step of the processed document is done in order to avoid losing data that may influence the accuracy of the two frameworks. Indeed, any learning step is performed. Thus, we avoid the process of extraction features a priori which will be performed automatically, taking into consideration the different characteristics of the documents.
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