Qi Song

Chinese scene text reading is one of the most challenging problems in computer vision and has attracted great interest. Different from English text, Chinese has more than 6000 commonly used characters and Chinese characters can be arranged in various layouts with numerous fonts. The Chinese signboards in street view are a good choice for Chinese scene text images since they have different backgrounds, fonts and layouts. We organized a competition called ICDAR2019-ReCTS, which mainly focuses on reading Chinese text on signboard. This report presents the final results of the competition. A large-scale dataset of 25,000 annotated signboard images, in which all the text lines and characters are annotated with locations and transcriptions, were released. Four tasks, namely character recognition, text line recognition, text line detection and end-to-end recognition were set up. Besides, considering the Chinese text ambiguity issue, we proposed a multi ground truth (multi-GT) evaluation method to make evaluation fairer. The competition started on March 1, 2019 and ended on April 30, 2019. 262 submissions from 46 teams are received. Most of the participants come from universities, research institutes, and tech companies in China. There are also some participants from the United States, Australia, Singapore, and Korea. 21 teams submit results for Task 1, 23 teams submit results for Task 2, 24 teams submit results for Task 3, and 13 teams submit results for Task 4. The official website for the competition is http://rrc.cvc.uab.es/?ch=12.

Querying heterogeneous and large-scale knowledge graphs is expensive. This paper studies a graph summarization framework to facilitate knowledge graph search. (1) We introduce a class of reduced summaries. Characterized by approximate graph pattern matching, these summaries are capable of summarizing entities in terms of their neighborhood similarity up to a certain hop, using small and informative graph patterns. (2) We study a diversified graph summarization problem. Given a knowledge graph, it is to discover top-k summaries that maximize a bi-criteria function, characterized by both informativeness and diversity. We show that diversified summarization is feasible for large graphs, by developing both sequential and parallel summarization algorithms. (a) We show that there exists a 2-approximation algorithm to discover diversified summaries. We further develop an anytime sequential algorithm which discovers summaries under resource constraints. (b) We present a new parallel algorithm with quality guarantees. The algorithm is parallel scalable, which ensures its feasibility in distributed graphs. (3) We also develop a summary-based query evaluation scheme, which only refers to a small number of summaries. Using real-world knowledge graphs, we experimentally verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our summarization algorithms, and query processing using summaries.