Sibt ul Hussain

Atique Ur Rehman, Sibt Ul Hussain

OCR algorithms have received a significant improvement in performance recently, mainly due to the increase in the capabilities of artificial intelligence algorithms. However, this advancement is not evenly distributed over all languages. Urdu is among the languages which did not receive much attention, especially in the font independent perspective. There exists no automated system that can reliably recognize printed Urdu text in images and videos across different fonts. To help bridge this gap, we have developed Qaida, a large scale data set with 256 fonts, and a complete Urdu lexicon. We have also developed a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based classification model which can recognize Urdu ligatures with 84.2% accuracy. Moreover, we demonstrate that our recognition network can not only recognize the text in the fonts it is trained on but can also reliably recognize text in unseen (new) fonts. To this end, this paper makes following contributions: (i) we introduce a large scale, multiple fonts based data set for printed Urdu text recognition;(ii) we have designed, trained and evaluated a CNN based model for Urdu text recognition; (iii) we experiment with incremental learning methods to produce state-of-the-art results for Urdu text recognition. All the experiment choices were thoroughly validated via detailed empirical analysis. We believe that this study can serve as the basis for further improvement in the performance of font independent Urdu OCR systems.

Muneeb Aadil, Rafia Rahim, Sibt ul Hussain

Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown promising performance in super-resolution (SR). However, these methods operate primarily on Low Resolution (LR) inputs for memory efficiency but this limits, as we demonstrate, their ability to (i) model high frequency information; and (ii) smoothly translate from LR to High Resolution (HR) space. To this end, we propose a novel Incremental Residual Learning (IRL) framework to address these mentioned issues. In IRL, first we select a typical SR pre-trained network as a master branch. Next we sequentially train and add residual branches to the main branch, where each residual branch is learned to model accumulated residuals of all previous branches. We plug state of the art methods in IRL framework and demonstrate consistent performance improvement on public benchmark datasets to set a new state of the art for SR at only approximately 20% increase in training time.

Mehreen Alam, Sibt ul Hussain

Neural Machine Translation models have replaced the conventional phrase based statistical translation methods since the former takes a generic, scalable, data-driven approach rather than relying on manual, hand-crafted features. The neural machine translation system is based on one neural network that is composed of two parts, one that is responsible for input language sentence and other part that handles the desired output language sentence. This model based on encoder-decoder architecture also takes as input the distributed representations of the source language which enriches the learnt dependencies and gives a warm start to the network. In this work, we transform Roman-Urdu to Urdu transliteration into sequence to sequence learning problem. To this end, we make the following contributions. We create the first ever parallel corpora of Roman-Urdu to Urdu, create the first ever distributed representation of Roman-Urdu and present the first neural machine translation model that transliterates text from Roman-Urdu to Urdu language. Our model has achieved the state-of-the-art results using BLEU as the evaluation metric. Precisely, our model is able to correctly predict sentences up to length 10 while achieving BLEU score of 48.6 on the test set. We are hopeful that our model and our results shall serve as the baseline for further work in the domain of neural machine translation for Roman-Urdu to Urdu using distributed representation.

Hasham Ul Haq, Rameel Ahmad, Sibt Ul Hussain

In order to submit a claim to insurance companies, a doctor needs to code a patient encounter with both the diagnosis (ICDs) and procedures performed (CPTs) in an Electronic Health Record (EHR). Identifying and applying relevant procedures code is a cumbersome and time-consuming task as a doctor has to choose from around 13,000 procedure codes with no predefined one-to-one mapping. In this paper, we propose a state-of-the-art deep learning method for automatic and intelligent coding of procedures (CPTs) from the diagnosis codes (ICDs) entered by the doctor. Precisely, we cast the learning problem as a multi-label classification problem and use distributed representation to learn the input mapping of high-dimensional sparse ICDs codes. Our final model trained on 2.3 million claims is able to outperform existing rule-based probabilistic and association-rule mining based methods and has a recall of 90@3.

Atique ur Rehman, Rafia Rahim, M Shahroz Nadeem et al.

All the existing image steganography methods use manually crafted features to hide binary payloads into cover images. This leads to small payload capacity and image distortion. Here we propose a convolutional neural network based encoder-decoder architecture for embedding of images as payload. To this end, we make following three major contributions: (i) we propose a deep learning based generic encoder-decoder architecture for image steganography; (ii) we introduce a new loss function that ensures joint end-to-end training of encoder-decoder networks; (iii) we perform extensive empirical evaluation of proposed architecture on a range of challenging publicly available datasets (MNIST, CIFAR10, PASCAL-VOC12, ImageNet, LFW) and report state-of-the-art payload capacity at high PSNR and SSIM values.

Syed Ammar Abbas, Sibt ul Hussain

Removing perspective distortion from hand held camera captured document images is one of the primitive tasks in document analysis, but unfortunately, no such method exists that can reliably remove the perspective distortion from document images automatically. In this paper, we propose a convolutional neural network based method for recovering homography from hand-held camera captured documents. Our proposed method works independent of document's underlying content and is trained end-to-end in a fully automatic way. Specifically, this paper makes following three contributions: Firstly, we introduce a large scale synthetic dataset for recovering homography from documents images captured under different geometric and photometric transformations; secondly, we show that a generic convolutional neural network based architecture can be successfully used for regressing the corners positions of documents captured under wild settings; thirdly, we show that L1 loss can be reliably used for corners regression. Our proposed method gives state-of-the-art performance on the tested datasets, and has potential to become an integral part of document analysis pipeline.