分析历史文书作者识别中端到端模型的性能瓶颈与优化方向。
Beyond the Pipeline: Analyzing Key Factors in End-to-End Deep Learning for Historical Writer Identification
- 对比多种预处理、主干网络和后处理组合,评估其对识别效果的影响。
- 多数配置在零样本场景下表现差,因低层特征捕捉弱且对内容噪声敏感。
- 发现一种简单设计可达到顶尖系统水平,为实际应用提供可靠方案。
本文研究影响历史文书作者识别(HWI)端到端深度学习方法性能的关键因素。由于手写风格多样、文档退化严重以及每位作者标注样本有限,该任务极具挑战性,甚至对人类专家也困难重重。传统方法依赖手工图像处理与聚类技术,在小而精心筛选的数据集上表现良好;而端到端方法试图直接从文档图像中学习特征以实现自动化。然而实验表明,多数模型在更真实的文档级设置下泛化能力差,尤其在零样本场景(测试集中作者未在训练中出现)时表现不佳。我们考察了不同预处理方式、主干架构及后处理策略(如文本分割、图像块采样与特征聚合),结果表明多数配置因低层视觉特征捕捉不足、图像块表示不一致及对内容噪声高度敏感而表现不佳。但仍有一个端到端配置在无需复杂设计的情况下,达到了与最优系统相当的性能。这些发现揭示了构建鲁棒端到端系统的关键挑战,并为提升历史文书作者识别的性能提供了设计启示。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
This paper investigates various factors that influence the performance of end-to-end deep learning approaches for historical writer identification (HWI), a task that remains challenging due to the diversity of handwriting styles, document degradation, and the limited number of labelled samples per writer. These conditions often make accurate recognition difficult, even for human experts. Traditional HWI methods typically rely on handcrafted image processing and clustering techniques, which tend to perform well on small and carefully curated datasets. In contrast, end-to-end pipelines aim to automate the process by learning features directly from document images. However, our experiments show that many of these models struggle to generalise in more realistic, document-level settings, especially under zero-shot scenarios where writers in the test set are not present in the training data. We explore different combinations of pre-processing methods, backbone architectures, and post-processing strategies, including text segmentation, patch sampling, and feature aggregation. The results suggest that most configurations perform poorly due to weak capture of low-level visual features, inconsistent patch representations, and high sensitivity to content noise. Still, we identify one end-to-end setup that achieves results comparable to the top-performing system, despite using a simpler design. These findings point to key challenges in building robust end-to-end systems and offer insight into design choices that improve performance in historical document writer identification.
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