Muhammad Zeshan Afzal

dblp:03/11339 · also Muhammad Zeeshan Afzal · DBLP profile ↗
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38ranked-venue papers
4as first author
21since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-0536-6867ORCID · verified

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 29 · 3 first-author · 16 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 17 · 3 first-author · 7 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 17 · 1 first-author · 12 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 NURBGen: High-Fidelity Text-to-CAD Generation Through LLM-Driven NURBS Modeling
abstract
Generating editable 3D CAD models from natural language remains challenging, as existing text-to-CAD systems either produce meshes or rely on scarce design-history data. We present NURBGen, the first framework to generate high fidelity 3D CAD models directly from text using Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS). To achieve this, we fine-tune a large language model (LLM) to translate free-form texts into JSON representations containing NURBS surface parameters (i.e, control points, knot vectors, degrees, and rational weights) which can be directly converted into BRep format using Python. We further propose a hybrid representation that combines untrimmed NURBS with analytic primitives to handle trimmed surfaces and degenerate regions more robustly, while reducing token complexity. Additionally, we introduce partABC, a curated subset of the ABC dataset consisting of individual CAD components, annotated with detailed captions using an automated annotation pipeline. NURBGen demonstrates strong performance on diverse prompts, surpassing prior methods in geometric fidelity and dimensional accuracy, as confirmed by expert evaluations.
Mohammad Sadil Khan, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
AAAI4
2025 MARVEL-40M+: Multi-Level Visual Elaboration for High-Fidelity Text-to-3D Content Creation
abstract
Generating high-fidelity 3D content from text prompts remains a significant challenge in computer vision due to the limited size, diversity, and annotation depth of the existing datasets. To address this, we introduce MARVEL-40M+, an extensive dataset with 40 million text annotations for over 8.9 million 3D assets aggregated from seven major 3D datasets. Our contribution is a novel multi-stage annotation pipeline that integrates open-source pretrained multi-view VLMs and LLMs to automatically produce multi-level descriptions, ranging from detailed (150-200 words) to concise semantic tags (10-20 words). This structure supports both fine-grained 3D reconstruction and rapid prototyping. Furthermore, we incorporate human metadata from source datasets into our annotation pipeline to add domain-specific information in our annotation and reduce VLM hallucinations. Additionally, we develop MARVEL-FX3D, a two-stage text-to-3D pipeline. We fine-tune Stable Diffusion with our annotations and use a pretrained image-to-3D network to generate 3D textured meshes within 15s. Extensive evaluations show that MARVEL-40M+ significantly outperforms existing datasets in annotation quality and linguistic diversity, achieving win rates of 72.41% by GPT-4 and 73.40% by human evaluators. Project page is available at https://sankalpsinha-cmos.github.io/MARVEL/.
Sankalp Sinha, Mohammad Sadil Khan, Shino Sam, Didier Stricker, Sk Aziz Ali, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
CVPR7
2025 TorchAdapt: Towards Light-Agnostic Real-Time Visual Perception
Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Karthik Palyakere Suresh, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
ICCV4
2025 STEP-DETR: Advancing DETR-based Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Super Teacher and Pseudo-Label Guided Text Queries
Tahira Shehzadi, Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Shalini Sarode, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
ICCV5
2025 SemiTabDETR: End-to-End Semi-supervised Table Detection with Transformer-Based Enhanced Query Approach
Tahira Shehzadi, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
ICDAR (1)3
2025 Beyond Boxes: Mask-Guided Spatio-Temporal Feature Aggregation for Video Object Detection
abstract
The primary challenge in Video Object Detection (VOD) is effectively exploiting temporal information to enhance object representations. Traditional strategies, such as aggregating region proposals, often suffer from feature variance due to the inclusion of background information. We introduce a novel instance mask-based feature aggregation approach, significantly refining this process and deepening the understanding of object dynamics across video frames. We present FAIM, a new VOD method that enhances temporal Feature Aggregation by leveraging Instance Mask features. In particular, we propose the lightweight Instance Feature Extraction Module (IFEM) to learn instance mask features and the Temporal Instance Classification Aggregation Module (TICAM) to aggregate instance mask and classification features across video frames. Using YOLOX as a base detector, FAIM achieves 87.9% mAP on the ImageNet VID dataset at 33 FPS on a single 2080Ti GPU, setting a new benchmark for the speed-accuracy trade-off. Additional experiments on multiple datasets validate that our approach is robust, method-agnostic, and effective in multi-object tracking, demonstrating its broader applicability to video understanding tasks.
Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Talha Uddin Sheikh, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
WACV4
2024 Sparse Semi-DETR: Sparse Learnable Queries for Semi-Supervised Object Detection
abstract
In this paper, we address the limitations of the DETR-based semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) framework, particularly focusing on the challenges posed by the quality of object queries. In DETR-based SSOD, the one-to-one as-signment strategy provides inaccurate pseudo-labels, while the one-to-many assignments strategy leads to overlapping predictions. These issues compromise training efficiency and degrade model performance, especially in detecting small or occluded objects. We introduce Sparse Semi-DETR, a novel transformer-based, end-to-end semi-supervised object detection solution to overcome these challenges. Sparse Semi-DETR incorporates a Query Refinement Module to enhance the quality of object queries, significantly improving detection capabilities for small and partially obscured objects. Additionally, we integrate a Reliable Pseudo-Label Filtering Module that selectively filters high-quality pseudo-labels, thereby enhancing detection accuracy and consistency. On the MS-COCO and Pascal VOC object detection benchmarks, Sparse Semi-DETR achieves a significant improvement over current state-of-the-art methods that highlight Sparse Semi-DETR's effectiveness in semi-supervised object detection, particularly in challenging scenarios involving small or partially obscured objects.
Tahira Shehzadi, Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
CVPR4
2024 Enhanced Bank Check Security: Introducing a Novel Dataset and Transformer-Based Approach for Detection and Verification
Muhammad Saif Ullah Khan, Tahira Shehzadi, Rabeya Noor, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
DAS5
2024 UnSupDLA: Towards Unsupervised Document Layout Analysis
Talha Uddin Sheikh, Tahira Shehzadi, Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
DAS5
2024 A Hybrid Approach for Document Layout Analysis in Document Images
Tahira Shehzadi, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
ICDAR (4)3
2024 Towards End-to-End Semi-supervised Table Detection with Semantic Aligned Matching Transformer
Tahira Shehzadi, Shalini Sarode, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
ICDAR (5)4
2024 CICA: Content-Injected Contrastive Alignment for Zero-Shot Document Image Classification
Sankalp Sinha, Muhammad Saif Ullah Khan, Talha Uddin Sheikh, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
ICDAR (4)5
2024 Text2CAD: Generating Sequential CAD Designs from Beginner-to-Expert Level Text Prompts
abstract
Prototyping complex computer-aided design (CAD) models in modern softwares can be very time-consuming. This is due to the lack of intelligent systems that can quickly generate simpler intermediate parts. We propose Text2CAD, the first AI framework for generating text-to-parametric CAD models using designer-friendly instructions for all skill levels. Furthermore, we introduce a data annotation pipeline for generating text prompts based on natural language instructions for the DeepCAD dataset using Mistral and LLaVA-NeXT. The dataset contains $\sim170$K models and $\sim660$K text annotations, from abstract CAD descriptions (e.g., _generate two concentric cylinders_) to detailed specifications (e.g., _draw two circles with center_ $(x,y)$ and _radius_ $r_{1}$, $r_{2}$, \textit{and extrude along the normal by} $d$...). Within the Text2CAD framework, we propose an end-to-end transformer-based auto-regressive network to generate parametric CAD models from input texts. We evaluate the performance of our model through a mixture of metrics, including visual quality, parametric precision, and geometrical accuracy. Our proposed framework shows great potential in AI-aided design applications. Project page is available at https://sadilkhan.github.io/text2cad-project/.
Mohammad Sadil Khan, Sankalp Sinha, Talha Uddin Sheikh, Didier Stricker, Sk Aziz Ali, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
NeurIPS6
2024 End-to-end semi-supervised approach with modulated object queries for table detection in documents
Iqraa Ehsan, Tahira Shehzadi, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
Int. J. Document Anal. Recognit.4
2023 I2MVFormer: Large Language Model Generated Multi-View Document Supervision for Zero-Shot Image Classification
abstract
Recent works have shown that unstructured text (doc-uments) from online sources can serve as useful auxiliary information for zero-shot image classification. However, these methods require access to a high-quality source like Wikipedia and are limited to a single source of information. Large Language Models (LLM) trained on web-scale text show impressive abilities to repurpose their learned knowledge for a multitude of tasks. In this work, we provide a novel perspective on using an LLM to provide text supervision for a zero-shot image classification model. The LLM is provided with a few text descriptions from different annota-tors as examples. The LLM is conditioned on these exam-ples to generate multiple text descriptions for each class (re-ferred to as views). Our proposed model, I2MVFormer, learns multi-view semantic embeddings for zero-shot image classification with these class views. We show that each text view of a class provides complementary information allowing a model to learn a highly discriminative class embed-ding. Moreover, we show that I2MVFormer is better at consuming the multi-view text supervision from LLM compared to baseline models. I2MVFormer establishes a new state-of-the-art on three public benchmark datasets for zero-shot image classification with unsupervised semantic embeddings. Code available at https://github.com/ferjad/I2DFormer
Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Muhammad Gul Zain Ali Khan, Yongqin Xian, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal, Didier Stricker, Luc Van Gool, Federico Tombari
CVPR4
2023 FeatEnHancer: Enhancing Hierarchical Features for Object Detection and Beyond Under Low-Light Vision
abstract
Extracting useful visual cues for the downstream tasks is especially challenging under low-light vision. Prior works create enhanced representations by either correlating visual quality with machine perception or designing illumination-degrading transformation methods that require pre-training on synthetic datasets. We argue that optimizing enhanced image representation pertaining to the loss of the downstream task can result in more expressive representations. Therefore, in this work, we propose a novel module, FeatEnHancer, that hierarchically combines multiscale features using multi-headed attention guided by task-related loss function to create suitable representations. Furthermore, our intra-scale enhancement improves the quality of features extracted at each scale or level, as well as combines features from different scales in a way that reflects their relative importance for the task at hand. FeatEnHancer is a general-purpose plug-and-play module and can be incorporated into any low-light vision pipeline. We show with extensive experimentation that the enhanced representation produced with FeatEnHancer significantly and consistently improves results in several low-light vision tasks, including dark object detection (+5.7 mAP on ExDark), face detection (+1.5 mAP on DARK FACE), nighttime semantic segmentation (+5.1 mIoU on ACDC), and video object detection (+1.8 mAP on DarkVision), highlighting the effectiveness of enhancing hierarchical features under low-light vision.
Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Goutham Kallempudi, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
ICCV4
2023 Introducing Language Guidance in Prompt-based Continual Learning
abstract
Continual Learning aims to learn a single model on a sequence of tasks without having access to data from previous tasks. The biggest challenge in the domain still remains catastrophic forgetting: a loss in performance on seen classes of earlier tasks. Some existing methods rely on an expensive replay buffer to store a chunk of data from previous tasks. This, while promising, becomes expensive when the number of tasks becomes large or data can not be stored for privacy reasons. As an alternative, prompt-based methods have been proposed that store the task information in a learnable prompt pool. This prompt pool instructs a frozen image encoder on how to solve each task. While the model faces a disjoint set of classes in each task in this setting, we argue that these classes can be encoded to the same embedding space of a pre-trained language encoder. In this work, we propose Language Guidance for Prompt-based Continual Learning (LGCL) as a plug-in for prompt-based methods. LGCL is model agnostic and introduces language guidance at the task level in the prompt pool and at the class level on the output feature of the vision encoder. We show with extensive experimentation that LGCL consistently improves the performance of prompt-based continual learning methods to set a new state-of-the art. LGCL achieves these performance improvements without needing any additional learnable parameters.
Muhammad Gul Zain Ali Khan, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Luc Van Gool, Didier Stricker, Federico Tombari, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
ICCV6
2023 Towards End-to-End Semi-Supervised Table Detection with Deformable Transformer
Tahira Shehzadi, Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Didier Stricker, Marcus Liwicki, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
ICDAR (2)5
2023 BoxMask: Revisiting Bounding Box Supervision for Video Object Detection
abstract
We present a new, simple yet effective approach to up- lift video object detection. We observe that prior works operate on instance-level feature aggregation that imminently neglects the refined pixel-level representation, resulting in confusion among objects sharing similar appearance or motion characteristics. To address this limitation, we propose BoxMask, which effectively learns discriminative representations by incorporating class-aware pixel-level information. We simply consider bounding box-level annotations as a coarse mask for each object to supervise our method. The proposed module can be effortlessly integrated into any region-based detector to boost detection. Extensive experiments on ImageNet VID and EPIC KITCHENS datasets demonstrate consistent and significant improvement when we plug our BoxMask module into numerous recent state-of-the-art methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/khurramHashmi/BoxMask.
Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Alain Pagani, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
WACV4
2023 Learning Attention Propagation for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning
abstract
Compositional zero-shot learning aims to recognize unseen compositions of seen visual primitives of object classes and their states. While all primitives (states and objects) are observable during training in some combination, their complex interaction makes this task especially hard. For example, wet changes the visual appearance of a dog very differently from a bicycle. Furthermore, we argue that relationships between compositions go beyond shared states or objects. A cluttered office can contain a busy table; even though these compositions don’t share a state or object, the presence of a busy table can guide the presence of a cluttered office. We propose a novel method called Compositional Attention Propagated Embedding (CAPE) as a solution. The key intuition to our method is that a rich dependency structure exists between compositions arising from complex interactions of primitives in addition to other dependencies between compositions. CAPE learns to identify this structure and propagates knowledge between them to learn class embedding for all seen and unseen compositions. In the challenging generalized compositional zero-shot setting, we show that our method outperforms previous baselines to set a new state-of-the-art on three publicly available benchmarks.
Muhammad Gul Zain Ali Khan, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Luc Van Gool, Alain Pagani, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
WACV6
2022 Spatio-Temporal Learnable Proposals for End-to-End Video Object Detection
Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
BMVC3
2018 Recognizing Challenging Handwritten Annotations with Fully Convolutional Networks
abstract
This paper introduces a very challenging dataset of historic German documents and evaluates Fully Convolutional Neural Network (FCNN) based methods to locate handwritten annotations of any kind in these documents. The handwritten annotations can appear in form of underlines and text by using various writing instruments, e.g., the use of pencils makes the data more challenging. We train and evaluate various end-to-end semantic segmentation approaches and report the results. The task is to classify the pixels of documents into two classes: background and handwritten annotation. The best model achieves a mean Intersection over Union (IOU) score of 95.6% on the test documents of the presented dataset. We also present a comparison of different strategies used for data augmentation and training on our presented dataset. For evaluation, we use the Layout Analysis Evaluator for the ICDAR 2017 Competition on Layout Analysis for Challenging Medieval Manuscripts.
Andreas Kölsch, Saurabh Varshneya, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal, Marcus Liwicki
ICFHR4
2017 Cutting the Error by Half: Investigation of Very Deep CNN and Advanced Training Strategies for Document Image Classification
abstract
We present an exhaustive investigation of recent Deep Learning architectures, algorithms, and strategies for the task of document image classification to finally reduce the error by more than half. Existing approaches, such as the DeepDoc-Classifier, apply standard Convolutional Network architectures with transfer learning from the object recognition domain. The contribution of the paper is threefold: First, it investigates recently introduced very deep neural network architectures (GoogLeNet, VGG, ResNet) using transfer learning (from real images). Second, it proposes transfer learning from a huge set of document images, i.e. 400; 000 documents. Third, it analyzes the impact of the amount of training data (document images) and other parameters to the classification abilities. We use two datasets, the Tobacco-3482 and the large-scale RVL-CDIP dataset. We achieve an accuracy of 91:13% for the Tobacco-3482 dataset while earlier approaches reach only 77:6%. Thus, a relative error reduction of more than 60% is achieved. For the large dataset RVL-CDIP, an accuracy of 90:97% is achieved, corresponding to a relative error reduction of 11:5%.
Muhammad Zeshan Afzal, Andreas Kölsch, Sheraz Ahmed, Marcus Liwicki
ICDAR1
2017 AirScript - Creating Documents in Air
abstract
This paper presents a novel approach, called AirScript, for creating, recognizing and visualizing documents in air. We present a novel algorithm, called 2-DifViz, that converts the hand movements in air (captured by a Myo-armband worn by a user) into a sequence of x, y coordinates on a 2D Cartesian plane, and visualizes them on a canvas. Existing sensor-based approaches either do not provide visual feedback or represent the recognized characters using prefixed templates. In contrast, AirScript stands out by giving freedom of movement to the user, as well as by providing a real-time visual feedback of the written characters, making the interaction natural. AirScript provides a recognition module to predict the content of the document created in air. To do so, we present a novel approach based on deep learning, which uses the sensor data and the visualizations created by 2-DifViz. The recognition module consists of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). and two Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) Networks. The output from these three networks is fused to get the final prediction about the characters written in air. AirScript can be used in highly sophisticated environments like a smart classroom, a smart factory or a smart laboratory, where it would enable people to annotate pieces of texts wherever they want without any reference surface. We have evaluated AirScript against various well-known learning models (HMM, KNN, SVM, etc.) on the data of 12 participants. Evaluation results show that the recognition module of AirScript largely outperforms all of these models by achieving an accuracy of 91.7% in a person independent evaluation and a 96.7% accuracy in a person dependent evaluation.
Ayushman Dash, Amit Sahu, Rajveer Shringi, John Cristian Borges Gamboa, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal, Muhammad Imran Malik, Andreas Dengel 0001, Sheraz Ahmed
ICDAR5
2017 Real-Time Document Image Classification Using Deep CNN and Extreme Learning Machines
abstract
This paper presents an approach for real-time training and testing for document image classification. In production environments, it is crucial to perform accurate and (time-)efficient training. Existing deep learning approaches for classifying documents do not meet these requirements, as they require much time for training and fine-tuning the deep architectures. Motivated from Computer Vision, we propose a two-stage approach. The first stage trains a deep network that works as feature extractor and in the second stage, Extreme Learning Machines (ELMs) are used for classification. The proposed approach outperforms all previously reported structural and deep learning based methods with a final accuracy of 83.24% on Tobacco-3482 dataset, leading to a relative error reduction of 25% when compared to a previous Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based approach (DeepDocClassifier). More importantly, the training time of the ELM is only 1.176 seconds and the overall prediction time for 2,482 images is 3.066 seconds. As such, this novel approach makes deep learning-based document classification suitable for large-scale real-time applications.
Andreas Kölsch, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal, Markus Ebbecke, Marcus Liwicki
ICDAR2
2017 D-StaR: A Generic Method for Stamp Segmentation from Document Images
abstract
B This paper presents a novel approach, named D-StaR, for stamp segmentation from scanned document images. The presented approach is generic (applicable to stamps of any color, shape, size, and orientation) and based on deep learning. In particular, it uses Fully Convolutional networks for semantic analysis of documents to extract stamps. The presented approach is evaluated on a publicly available stamp dataset. Evaluation results show that the presented approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for stamp segmentation and achieves pixel based precision and recall of 87% and 84%, respectively. Deeper analysis of the evaluation reveals that the presented approach can segment both overlapping and non-overlapping stamps, which was always a problem for existing systems in the literature.
Junaid Younas, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal, Muhammad Imran Malik, Faisal Shafait, Paul Lukowicz, Sheraz Ahmed
ICDAR2
2016 Complete System for Text Line Extraction Using Convolutional Neural Networks and Watershed Transform
abstract
We present a novel Convolutional Neural Network based method for the extraction of text lines, which consists of an initial Layout Analysis followed by the estimation of the Main Body Area (i.e., the text area between the baseline and the corpus line) for each text line. Finally, a region-based method using watershed transform is performed on the map of the Main Body Area for extracting the resulting lines. We have evaluated the new system on the IAM-HisDB, a publicly available dataset containing historical documents, outperforming existing learning-based text line extraction methods, which consider the problem as pixel labelling problem into text and non-text regions.
Joan Pastor-Pellicer, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal, Marcus Liwicki, María José Castro Bleda
DAS2
2016 KPTI: Katib's Pashto Text Imagebase and Deep Learning Benchmark
abstract
This paper presents the first Pashto text image database for scientific research and thereby the first dataset with complete handwritten and printed text line images which ultimately covers all alphabets of Arabic and Persian languages. Language like Pashto, written in a complex way by calligraphers, still requires a mature Optical Character Recognition (OCR), system. Although 50 million people use this language both for oral and written communication, there is no significant effort which is devoted to the recognition of Pashto Script. A real dataset of 17,015 images having Pashto text lines is introduced. The images are acquired via scanning from hand scribed Pashto books. Further, in this work, we evaluated the performance of deep learning based models like Bidirectional and Multi-Dimensional Long Short Term Memory (BLSTM and MDLSTM) networks for Pashto texts and provide a baseline character error rate of 9.22%.
Riaz Ahmad 0001, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal, Sheikh Faisal Rashid, Marcus Liwicki, Thomas M. Breuel, Andreas Dengel 0001
ICFHR2
2016 Evaluation of cursive and non-cursive scripts using recurrent neural networks
Saad Bin Ahmed, Saeeda Naz, Muhammad Imran Razzak, Sheikh Faisal Rashid, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal, Thomas M. Breuel
Neural Comput. Appl.5
2015 Deepdocclassifier: Document classification with deep Convolutional Neural Network
abstract
This paper presents a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based approach for document image classification. One of the main requirement of deep CNN architecture is that they need huge number of samples for training. To overcome this problem we adopt a deep CNN which is trained using big image dataset containing millions of samples i.e., ImageNet. The proposed work outperforms both the traditional structure similarity methods and the CNN based approaches proposed earlier. The accuracy of the proposed approach with merely 20 images per class outperforms the state-of-the-art by achieving classification accuracy of 68.25%. The best results on Tobbacoo-3428 dataset show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art method by a significant margin and achieved a median accuracy of 77.6% with 100 samples per class used for training and validation.
Muhammad Zeshan Afzal, Samuele Capobianco, Muhammad Imran Malik, Simone Marinai, Thomas M. Breuel, Andreas Dengel 0001, Marcus Liwicki
ICDAR1
2015 Scale and rotation invariant OCR for Pashto cursive script using MDLSTM network
abstract
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of cursive scripts like Pashto and Urdu is difficult due the presence of complex ligatures and connected writing styles. In this paper, we evaluate and compare different approaches for the recognition of such complex ligatures. The approaches include Hidden Markov Model (HMM), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network and Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT). Current state of the art in cursive script assumes constant scale without any rotation, while real world data contain rotation and scale variations. This research aims to evaluate the performance of sequence classifiers like HMM and LSTM and compare their performance with descriptor based classifier like SIFT. In addition, we also assess the performance of these methods against the scale and rotation variations in cursive script ligatures. Moreover, we introduce a database of 480,000 images containing 1000 unique ligatures or sub-words of Pashto. In this database, each ligature has 40 scale and 12 rotation variations. The evaluation results show a significantly improved performance of LSTM over HMM and traditional feature extraction technique such as SIFT.
Riaz Ahmad 0001, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal, Sheikh Faisal Rashid, Marcus Liwicki, Thomas M. Breuel
ICDAR2
2015 Recognizable units in Pashto language for OCR
abstract
Atomic segmentation of cursive scripts into constituent characters is one of the most challenging problems in pattern recognition. To avoid segmentation in cursive script, concrete shapes are considered as recognizable units. Therefore, the objective of this work is to find out the alternate recognizable units in Pashto cursive script. These alternatives are ligatures and primary ligatures. However, we need sound statistical analysis to find the appropriate numbers of ligatures and primary ligatures in Pashto script. In this work, a corpus of 2, 313, 736 Pashto words are extracted from a large scale diversified web sources, and total of 19, 268 unique ligatures have been identified in Pashto cursive script. Analysis shows that only 7000 ligatures represent 91% portion of overall corpus of the Pashto unique words. Similarly, about 7, 681 primary ligatures are also identified which represent the basic shapes of all the ligatures.
Riaz Ahmad 0001, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal, Sheikh Faisal Rashid, Marcus Liwicki, Andreas Dengel 0001, Thomas M. Breuel
ICDAR2
2015 A sequence learning approach for multiple script identification
abstract
In this paper, we present a novel methodology for multiple script identification using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks' sequence-learning capabilities. Our method is able to identify multiple scripts at text-line level, where two or more scripts are present in the same text-line. Unlike traditional techniques, where either shape features or bounding boxes of individual characters are extracted, the LSTM-based system learns a particular script in a supervised learning framework. Moreover, this system neither needs specific features nor other preprocessing steps other than text-line extraction and text-line normalization. The proposed method works on text-line level, where it identifies each character as belonging to a particular script. We have developed a database consisting of English and Greek script, and our system achieved a script recognition accuracy of 98.186% on this dataset.
Adnan Ul-Hasan, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal, Faisal Shafait, Marcus Liwicki, Thomas M. Breuel
ICDAR2
2014 Using recurrent networks for non-temporal classification tasks
abstract
In recent years, deep neural networks have led to considerable advances in the performance of neural network architectures. However, deep architectures tend to have a large numbers of parameters, leading to long training times and the need for huge amounts of training data and regularization. In addition, biological neural networks make extensive use of recurrent and feedback connections, which are absent for most commonly used deep architectures. In this paper, we investigate the use of recurrent neural networks as an alternative to deep architectures. The approach replaces depth with recurrent computations through time. It can also be seen as a deep architecture with parameter tying. We show that for a comparable numbers of parameters or complexity, replacing depth with recurrency can result in improved performance.
Saurav Biswas, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal, Thomas M. Breuel
IJCNN2
2012 Improvements to Uncalibrated Feature-Based Stereo Matching for Document Images by Using Text-Line Segmentation
abstract
Document images prove to be a difficult case for standard stereo correspondence approaches. One of the major problem is that document images are highly self-similar. Most algorithms try to tackle this problem by incorporating a global optimization scheme, which tends to be computationally expensive. In this paper, we show that incorporation of layout information into the matching paradigm, as a grouping entity for features, leads to better results in terms of robustness, efficiency, and ultimately in a better 3D model of the captured document, that can be used in various document restoration systems. This can be seen as a divide and conquer approach that partitions the search space into portions given by each grouping entity and then solves each of them independently. As a grouping entity text-lines are preferred over individual character blobs because it is easier to establish correspondences. Text-line extraction works reasonably well on stereo image pairs in the presence of perspective distortions. The proposed approach is highly efficient and matches obtained are more reliable. The claims are backed up by showing their practical applicability through experimental evaluations.
Muhammad Zeshan Afzal, Martin Krämer, Syed Saqib Bukhari, Faisal Shafait, Thomas M. Breuel
Document Analysis Systems1
2012 Robust stereo matching for document images using parameter selection of text-line extraction
Muhammad Zeshan Afzal, Syed Saqib Bukhari, Martin Krämer, Faisal Shafait, Thomas M. Breuel
ICPR1
2012 Robust stereo correspondence for documents by matching connected components of text-lines with dynamic programming
Martin Krämer, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal, Syed Saqib Bukhari, Faisal Shafait, Thomas M. Breuel
ICPR2
2012 Learning feature weights of symbols, with application to symbol spotting
Nibal Nayef, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal, Thomas M. Breuel
ICPR2