PhoNet: An Approach Towards Zero-shot Word Image Recognition in Historical Documents

Annotating words in a historical document image archive for word image recognition purpose demands time and skilled human resource (like historians, paleographers). In a real-life scenario, obtaining sample images for all possible words is also not feasible. However, Zero-shot learning methods could aptly be used to recognize unseen/out-of-lexicon words in such historical document images. Based on previous state-of-the-art methods for word spotting and recognition, we propose a hybrid representation that considers the character's shape appearance to differentiate between two different words and has shown to be more effective in recognizing unseen words. This representation has been termed as Pyramidal Histogram of Shapes (PHOS), derived from PHOC, which embeds information about the occurrence and position of characters in the word. Later, the two representations are combined and experiments were conducted to examine the effectiveness of an embedding that has properties of both PHOS and PHOC. Encouraging results were obtained on two publicly available historical document datasets and one synthetic handwritten dataset, which justifies the efficacy of "Phos" and the combined "Pho(SC)" representation.