September – 2008 ^October

The heritage of a community defines the character and uniqueness of that community. However, because of the high degree of degradation suffered by very old documents, analyzing them is a difficult task. In this presentation, a degradation model is provided which is based on the physical understanding of degradation. This model can also be used to generate ground truth datasets. Based on this degradation model, various enhancement and restoration methods are proposed in different paradigms such as variational framework, PDE-based methods, and statistical methods. For improving the performance of these methods, several classifiers on different levels ranging from local level to global level are introduced. Based on the latter concept, all preprocessing methods can be modified and improved. The methods are tested on several datasets with promising results.

Short bio:

Mohamed Cheriet was born in Algiers (Algeria) in 1960. He received his B.Eng. from USTHB University (Algiers) in 1984 and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI) in 1985 and 1988 respectively. Since 1992, he has been a professor in the Automation Engineering department at the École de Technologie Supérieure (University of Quebec), Montreal, and was appointed full professor there in 1998. He co-founded the Laboratory for Imagery, Vision and Artificial Intelligence (LIVIA) at the University of Quebec, and was its director from 2000 to 2006. He also founded the SYNCHROMEDIA Consortium (Multimedia Communication in Telepresence) there, and has been its director since 1998. His interests include document image analysis, OCR, mathematical models for image processing, pattern classification models and learning algorithms, as well as perception in computer vision. Dr. Cheriet has published more than 200 technical papers in the field, and has served as chair or co-chair of the following international conferences: VI’1998, VI’2000, IWFHR’2002, and ICFHR’2008. He currently serves on the editorial board and is associate editor of several international journals: IJPRAI, IJDAR, and Pattern Recognition. He co-authored a book entitled,”Character Recognition Systems: A guide for Students and Practitioners,” John Wiley and Sons, 2007. Dr. Cheriet is a senior member of the IEEE and the chapter chair of IEEE Montreal Computational Intelligent Systems (CIS).