Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Using Entropy to Distinguish Shape Versus Text in Hand-Drawn Diagrams (Paper Report)



Bibliography:


Bhat, Akshay, and Tracy Hammond. "Using Entropy to Distinguish Shape Versus Text in Hand-Drawn Diagrams." IJCAI. Vol. 9. 2009.

Link:


http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/IJCAI/IJCAI-09/paper/download/592/906

Summary:


Entropy is used, in the sense of information theory, to classify text from shapes. In this sense text is thought to be more random, have greater entropy, than shapes. To encode the entropy of a stroke the authors use an alphabet which consists of seven letters which describe the angle of a stroke point with its two temporal neighbors (one for the endpoints.) Some preprocessing is done by normalizing the stroke, resampling so that points are equidistant from each other. Strokes are also grouped together according to some threshold in the spatial and temporal dimension. Strokes that are close together in time and space should belong to the same class (text or shape.) Finally probability of given 'letter' is used to calculate the entropy according to the following formula:


To calculate the confidence the authors use:


where b is the confidence of classification of TEXT is 0.5.

They trained on COA drawings and tested classification on mechanics drawings with favorable results. 

Comments:


I think this approach is very clever.  I'm interested in how entropy differs between different users from different locales.

Research Ideas:


Find out what other domains might entropy be relevant in classification.

4 comments:

  1. I think for people with different ages the entropy of their strokes may be different since shaking exists in children and elders.

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  2. I'm guessing there has been research done on looking at handwriting styles from different regions of the world. Maybe you could use that research to look at your question on how entropy differs between locales?

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  3. This was one of my favorite papers to review. I hadn't thought of representing sketches in this way. It's almost like representing the sketch as its derivative or a filtering operation in way. I hadn't considered how it would differ by region, but I think you'd be right. Dr. Hammond has mentioned how certain languages, like French, include a lot of smooth curves and tall, thin letters. That may influence how they draw certain shapes. Likewise, some individuals use block letters for everything, so maybe they have a very blocky way of drawing shapes. It's all very interesting research!

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  4. It was really interesting to know entropy could be used for sketch recognition purposes.

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