Phillip Pearson - Second p0st

tech notes and web hackery from the guy that brought you bzero, python community server, the blogging ecosystem, the new zealand coffee review and the internet topic exchange

2006-2-16

Notes from DAS2006

I just got back today from the 7th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (proceedings), held in Nelson from 13-15 Feb.

The presentations were all about document or image analysis, but the heavy use of AI techniques could make some of it relevant to what I work on these days.

Some of the interesting people I met or caught up with:

Projects I should take a look at:

Techniques I should learn (or re-learn):

  • Gabor filters
  • Hidden Markov models
  • Standard classifiers: NNC, LDC
  • Analytical segmentation
  • Dynamic programming
  • Viterbi algorithm
  • Dynamic time warping
  • RAST algorithm for alignment
  • X-tree spatial indexing algorithm
  • Affine invariants
  • Gaussian mixed models

Things that should exist:

  • A better browser for mailing lists - that thinks more about the message content and tries to figure out what's going on, presenting more statistics etc in the list view to help you find interesting messages.
  • A browser for academic papers with tagging so you can collect together papers on a very specific subject without prejudicing the normal categorisation.
  • Realtime image stitching - build a panorama out of a video. (Existing: traffic monitoring.)
  • Connected component analysis on colour images.
... more like this: []

Free OCR

Just so I don't forget - found this free OCR engine on SourceForge, a "commercial quality OCR engine originally developed at HP between 1985 and 1995".

Rumour has it that Google will be developing open source OCR soon...