About the dprl

What we do, and a brief overview.

Overview

  • The Document and Pattern Recognition Lab (dprl) started in Summer 2007. We research technologies for extracting and searching graphics and text in documents and videos, with an emphasis on math notation and chemical diagrams. Along the way, we've also done work on Video CAPTCHAs, recognizing music notation, text detection, and evaluating structural pattern recognition systems. Details can be found in our pages listing publications and software/data.
  • Our work involves multiple areas of Computer Science, including Information Retrieval (IR), Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (ML), and even some Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
  • We have created state-of-the-art math recognition modules and math formula search engines, ran the ARQMath labs for CLEF, and ran the CROHME handwritten math recognition competitions at ICDAR and ICFHR. We also created the MathDeck math-aware search engine, as well as the ChemScraper PDF molecule extraction tool in collaboration with the Denmark Lab (UIUC) and NCSA. For details, see our overview of past projects.
  • University students of all levels (BSc, MSc, and PhD) with a wide variety of interests and backgrounds have worked in the lab. See our Members and Thesis/Project pages for details.
  • Support. The dprl has been supported by a number of organizations, including the NSF, Xerox, Google, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Please see our support page for details.

Present & Past Projects

MMLI

NSF-funded AI Center aiming to  democratize molecule making

MathSeer

Math-aware search project funded by NSF & Sloan Foundation

ChemScraper Demo

Online tool for extracting molecules from PDF (*in development)

MathDeck Demo (SIGIR 2023)

Math-aware search engine (SIGIR 2023/ ACL Collection)

ARQMath

ARQMath Lab, CLEF 2020-2021 (Math-aware search tasks)

CROHME+TFD 2019

CROHME 2019 + TFD competition at ICDAR 2019 (handwritten math recognition, typeset formula detection)

NTCIR-12 MathIR Lab

NTCIR-12 MathIR Lab (Math-aware search tasks)

AccessMath Math Formula Search in Video

AccessMath math formula search and navigation in video

Audio Search in Math Lectures

DTW-based within-speaker audio search in math lectures 

min math-aware search interface

min math-aware search interface and multi-modal editor

Video CATPCHA (2008)

Video CATPCHA

More Information About the Lab

Address

Room 70-3500, GCCIS
Dept. Computer Science
Rochester Inst. Technology
Rochester, NY, 14623-5608
USA

Contacts

Email: rxzvcs@rit.edu
Phone: +1 (585) 475-4536
Fax: +1 (585) 475-4935