This repository contains the official code implementation of our paper

Marco Peer, Florian Kleber and Robert Sablatnig : Towards Writer Retrieval for Historical Datasets,

an unsupervised approach using NetRVLAD and Similarity Graph Reranking, which will be presented at ICDAR 2023 this year. It is currently state of the art on the ICDAR17 (80.6% mAP) and ICDAR19 (93.2% mAP) dataset for writer retrieval. Paper

Installation

Install the packages via

pip install -r requirements.txt

The repository uses wandb for logging.

Patch extraction

We provide four scripts (two with a color version each for RGB images) to extract the patches from the documents:

• extract_patches_only : only extracts patches without clustering (mainly used for test sets)
• extract_patches : extracts patches and clusters their descriptors (mainly used to train sets)

The respective configs for the scripts to reproduce our results are located in the config directory (config/config_patches.yml).

Defining your dataset

If you use the patch extraction scripts provided, edit the paths of the respective dataset in writer_zoo.py:

'icdar2017': {
    'basepath': BASEPATH,
    'set': {
        'test' :  {'path': YOUR_TEST_DIRECTORY,
                            'regex' : {'writer': '(\d+)', 'page': '\d+-IMG_MAX_(\d+)'}},

        'train' :  {'path': YOUR_TRAIN_DIRECTORY,
                            'regex' : {'cluster' : '(\d+)', 'writer': '\d+_(\d+)', 'page' : '\d+_\d+-\d+-IMG_MAX_(\d+)'}},
        
    }
}

The labels used for our repository are extracted by regular expressions. (supported: ICDAR2013, ICDAR2017, ICDAR2019 dataset, refer to our paper for more details).

Training and testing

Run

python main.py --gpuid=GPU_ID --config=config/icdar2017.yml

to run training on ICDAR2017. Afterward, testing is executed if a testset is specified in the config file. Refer to main.py for further commands.

Rerank

For the reranking part, you are expected to provide an embedding file (.npy), then run

python rerank.py --algorithm='sgr'

which creates the reranked descriptors and saves them. Refer to rerank.py for further commands and functionalities.

Citing

Please consider citing our paper if you find our resources helpful

@inproceedings{10.1007/978-3-031-41676-7_24,
author = {Peer, Marco and Kleber, Florian and Sablatnig, Robert},
title = {Towards Writer Retrieval for Historical Datasets},
year = {2023},
booktitle = {Document Analysis and Recognition - ICDAR 2023: 17th International Conference, San Jos\'{e}, CA, USA, August 21–26, 2023, Proceedings, Part I},
pages = {411–427},
numpages = {17},
location = {San Jos\'{e}, CA, USA}
}

Feel free to reach out to us via mpeer(at)cvl.tuwien.ac.at in case you find errors or have questions about our paper.