12662254
Creating digital libraries: content generation and re-mastering
This article has two main goals: to describe the automatic creation of a digital library and to provide an overview of the metaalgorithmic patterns that can be applied to increase the accuracy of its creation. Automating the creation of useful digital libraries - that is, digital libraries affording searchable text and reusable ("repurposable") output - is a complicated process, whether the original library is paper-based or already available in electronic form. We outline the steps involved in the creation of a deployable digital library (>1.2 /spl times/ 10/sup 6/ pages) for MIT Press, as well as its implications to other aspects of digital library creation, management, use and repurposing. Input, transformation, information extraction, and output processes are considered in light of their utility in creating layers of content. Interestingly, in some aspects, scanning directly from paper offers extra opportunities for error-checking through feedback-feedforward combination. Strategies for quality assurance (QA) at the document, chapter and book level are also discussed. We emphasize the use of metaalgorithmic design patterns for application towards improving the content generation, extraction and remastering. This approach also increases the ease with which modules and algorithms are added to and deprecated from the system.
26474180
Adaptive confidence transform based classifier combination for Chinese character recognition
Abstract Classifier combination is an effective way to improve recognition performance. However, in Chinese character recognition the extremely large number of categories results in several difficulties for the combination. In order to overcome these difficulties a novel combination method is presented in this paper. It consists of three main components: adaptive confidence transform (ACT), consensus theoretic combination and reliability based speedup scheme. ACT, which can estimate a posteriori probabilities from raw measurement values, is the focus of this paper. Experimental results show a significant reduction of error rates in both printed (PCCR) and handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR).
2250003
ICDAR 2003 robust reading competitions: entries, results, and future directions
Abstract.This paper describes the robust reading competitions for ICDAR 2003. With the rapid growth in research over the last few years on recognizing text in natural scenes, there is an urgent need to establish some common benchmark datasets and gain a clear understanding of the current state of the art. We use the term ‘robust reading’ to refer to text images that are beyond the capabilities of current commercial OCR packages. We chose to break down the robust reading problem into three subproblems and run competitions for each stage, and also a competition for the best overall system. The subproblems we chose were text locating, character recognition and word recognition. By breaking down the problem in this way, we hoped to gain a better understanding of the state of the art in each of the subproblems. Furthermore, our methodology involved storing detailed results of applying each algorithm to each image in the datasets, allowing researchers to study in depth the strengths and weaknesses of each algorithm. The text-locating contest was the only one to have any entries. We give a brief description of each entry and present the results of this contest, showing cases where the leading entries succeed and fail. We also describe an algorithm for combining the outputs of the individual text locators and show how the combination scheme improves on any of the individual systems.
8724659
Estimating device availability in pervasive peer-to-peer environment
In pervasive computing environments, devices often communicate in a peer-to-peer manner, either for passing messages or collaboratively running applications. For any particular device, information about the availability of other devices can lead to more efficient communication and better execution of distributed tasks. For example, a device can distribute computation tasks to reliable devices and temporarily avoid unreliable ones. Since there usually is not a central server to coordinate or monitor the communication in such environment, a key technical challenge is for each individual device to predict the availability of other devices. In this paper, we describe some methods for predicting the availability of other devices using historic availability data of those devices obtained in routine usage. In this scheme, each device separately maintains data about the past communication with the other devices, and predicts current and future availability using the statistics of those data. These methods do not require any centralized monitoring or extra probing, and thus have very low computation cost. These characteristics make them suitable for small devices in a peer-to-peer environment.
15560852
Performance analysis of pattern classifier combination by plurality voting
Plurality voting is widely used in pattern recognition. However, there is little theoretical analysis of plurality voting. In this paper, we attempt to explore the rationale behind plurality voting. The recognition/error/rejection rates of plurality voting are compared with those of majority voting under different conditions. It is demonstrated that plurality voting is more efficient in achieving the tradeoff between rejection rate and error rate. We also discuss some practical problems when applying plurality voting to real-world applications.
8341476
Active document layout synthesis
Document layout analysis has been researched for many years. However, there is little work on the reverse of document layout analysis: document layout synthesis, whose goal is to generate logically correct and aesthetically appealing layout given the text/image contents and the flexible layout template. This paper introduces a new automatic document layout synthesis method, which can actively pursue the optimal text block height-width tradeoff simultaneously with the block position adjustment. The key idea is to use a cluster of linear functions to approximate the nonlinear height-width curve. Then two-pass simplex algorithm is used to solve the layout synthesis problem. This method has a wide range of applications, such as variable data printing (VDP), automatic table formatting, and automating document layout ground truth generation.
18241581
An Associative Information Visualizer
The following item is made available as a courtesy to scholars by the author(s) and Drexel University Library and may contain materials and content, including computer code and tags, artwork, text, graphics, images, and illustrations (Material) which may be protected by copyright law. Unless otherwise noted, the Material is made available for non profit and educational purposes, such as research, teaching and private study. For these limited purposes, you may reproduce (print, download or make copies) the Material without prior permission. All copies must include any copyright notice originally included with the Material. You must seek permission from the authors or copyright owners for all uses that are not allowed by fair use and other provisions of the U.S. Copyright Law. The responsibility for making an independent legal assessment and securing any necessary permission rests with persons desiring to reproduce or use the Material.
8871501
Improving backward recovery in workflow systems
The notion of compensation is widely used as means of backward recovery in long-lived transactions as well as in business processes supported by workflow management systems. In general, it is non-trivial to design compensating tasks for tasks in the context of a workflow. Actually, a task does not have to be compensatable. In this paper, we first look into the requirements that a compensating task has to satisfy. Then we introduce a new mechanism called confirmation. With the help of confirmation, we can modify some non-compensatable tasks so that they become compensatable. This greatly improves backward recovery for workflow applications in the case of failures. To effectively incorporate confirmation and compensation into the workflow management environment, a three-level bottom-up workflow design method is introduced. The implementation issues of this design are also discussed.
1773095
Delay Optimization in Quorum Consensus
Abstract
 The management of replicated data in distributed database systems is a classic problem with great
practical importance. Quorum consensus is one of the popular methods, combined with eager replication, for
managing replicated data. In this paper we investigate the problems of delay-optimal quorum consensus.
Firstly, we show that the problem of minimizing the total delay (or mean delay) restricted to a ring can be
solved in a constant time in contrast to the existing approximation results. Secondly, we show that the problem
of minimizing the total delay (or mean delay) is NP-hard. Thirdly, we present an approximate algorithm with
an approximate ratio 2; and the approximate algorithm can guarantee the exact solutions for some specific
network topology, such as trees and meshes. Finally, we present an improvement on the existing algorithm
to solve the problem of minimizing the maximal delay; this reduces the time complexity from O(n3 log n) to
O(n3) where n is the number of nodes.
21113165
Graphical representations of electronic search patterns
Increasing numbers of researchers and developers are collecting data that trace the processes of humancomputer interactions. Although a variety of methods are used to collect such data, all researchers share common problems in representing and analyzing continuous streams of data. A set of methods and tools for graphically representing the search patterns of users interacting with a variety of databases and hypertexts is under development as part of ongoing research in electronic information seeking. The methodology described in this article involves defining state spaces of user options within a system, capturing keystrokes or mouse moves as raw data, coding these data into the state spaces, and analyzing user moves through the state space as evidence of goal-directed informationseeking strategies and patterns. A tool for displaying user moves through a state space has been developed and is described. The tool graphically represents data in a variety of formats, allowing human pattern recognition capabilities to be applied for data analysis. Graphs can be represented for individual searches or for multiple searches done by either a single searcher or by several searchers working on the same search task.
9661555
Multicast in Fat-Tree-Based InfiniBand Networks
The multicast operation is a very commonly used operation in parallel applications. With the hardware supported multicast of the InfiniBand architecture (IBA), we propose a cyclic multicast scheme for fat-tree-based (m-port n-tree) InfiniBand networks. The basic concept of the proposed cyclic multicast scheme is to find the union sets of the output ports of switches in the paths between the source processing node and each destination processing node in a multicast group. Based on the union sets and the path selection scheme, the forwarding table for a given multicast group can be constructed. We implement the proposed multicast scheme along with the OpenSM multicast scheme and the unicast scheme on an m-port n-tree InfiniBand network simulator. The simulation results show that the proposed multicast scheme outperforms the unicast scheme for all simulated cases. For many-to-many and all-to-many cases, the cyclic multicast scheme outperforms the OpenSM multicast scheme. For many-to-all case, the performance of the cyclic multicast scheme is a little better than that of the OpenSM multicast scheme