Automatic segmentation of foreground text from the background in degraded document images is very much essential for the smooth reading of the document content and recognition tasks by machine. In this paper, we present a novel approach to the binarization of degraded document images. The proposed method uses a new local contrast feature extracted based on the stroke width of text. First, a pre...

The splab team participated in the Chinese subtask of the NTCIR-12 on Short Text Conversation Task. This task assumes that the existing comments in a post-comment repository can be reused as suitable responses to a new short text. Our task is to return 10 most appropriate comments to such a short text. In our system, we attempt to employ advanced IR methods and the recent deep learning techniqu...

This paper presents the participation of the Fraunhofer IDMT in the ImageCLEF 2011 Photo Annotation Task. Our approach is focused on text-based features and strategies to combine visual and textual information. First, we apply a pre-processing step on the provided Flickr tags to reduce noise. For each concept, tf-idf values per tag are computed and used to construct a text-based descriptor. Sec...

This paper reports on an intervention study, which considered the impact of text messaging on 9-10 year old children’s literacy skills. 114 children who had never owned a mobile phone before were recruited and randomly allocated to either the intervention or control conditions. All children were pre and post tested on a range of reading, spelling and phonological awareness measures. Children in...

Background. Dysphagia is a common complication in patients with stroke. The research on acupuncture treatment of dysphagia has increased, but the results are not consistent. In this review we intend to answer “what is the potential of acupuncture in treating dysphagia in stroke patients and which acupuncture points are the most promising for treating dysphagia?” Methods. This systematic review...

In this paper we propose a robust approach for text extraction and recognition from video clips which is called Neuro-Fuzzy system for Arabic Video OCR. In Arabic video text recognition, a number of noise components provide the text relatively more complicated to separate from the background. Further, the characters can be moving or presented in a diversity of colors, sizes and fonts that are n...