I am a Professor of Computer Science at RIT. My research interests include pattern recognition and machine learning, with applications in document recognition and information retrieval. Recently I've worked on math-aware search engines and interfaces, recognizing math notation, locating text in pictures, and audio-visual search in lecture videos.

I direct the Document and Pattern Recognition Lab (dprl) and am affiliated with the Intelligent Systems Area in the Computer Science Department. I am on the Editorial Board for the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR), and am a member of the IEEE Computer Society, ACM, and International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR).

Please click on the links above for information about my teaching, research, publications (including .pdfs), software produced by or associated with the dprl, and resources for students.

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News (dprl News)

ICFHR Papers on Line-of-Sight (LOS) Based Handwritten Formula Recognition. Two papers by my recently graduated PhD student Lei Hu have been accepted for publication at ICFHR 2016. The papers describe using LOS graphs for representating and recognizing handwritten formula written on tablets, along with the use of novel Parzen window-based Shape Context features for recognition. Lei obtained state-of-the-art symbol segmentation and surprisingly strong full formula recognition results for the CROHME handwritten math data sets without making use of expression grammars.

ICFHR 2018. Along with R. Manmatha and Venu Govindaraju, I will be chairing the 2018 International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition in Rochester. The next ICFHR will be held in Shenzhen, China in Oct. 2016.

CROHME 2016. The CROHME 2016 international handwritten math recognition competition has ended! Congratulations to MyScript and Wiris for obtaining the highest recognition rates. Details of the competition will appear in an upcoming paper at ICFHR.

NTCIR-12 MathIR Competition. I co-organized the NTCIR-12 Math Information Retrieval Task for the NTCIR-12 conference held in Tokyo (June, 2016). The NTCIR-12 MathIR Task overview paper is available, along with all participant papers describing submitted systems and results.

PhD Student Defenses. Congratulations to Dr. Lei Hu and Dr. Siyu Zhu who defended their dissertations in April, and to Kenny Davila, who successfully defended his PhD proposal in June.

SIGIR 2016 Formula Search Paper. My PhD student Kenny Davila co-authored a paper on scalable formula search entitled "Multi-Stage Math Formula Search: Using Appearance-Based Similarity Metrics at Scale", which was accepted for publication at ACM SIGIR 2016. Kenny's co-authors include Frank Tompa and Andrew Kane from Univ. Waterloo, and myself. SIGIR is the leading international conference on Information Retrieval.

CVPR 2016 Text Detection Paper. A paper by my PhD student Siyu Zhu, entitled "A Text Detection System for Natural Scenes with Convolutional Feature Learning and Cascaded Classification" was accepted for publication at CVPR, the leading international computer vision conference. Siyu obtained state-of-the-art text detection results for the ICDAR 2015 Robust Reading Competition (Focused Scene Text Localization task).

AccessMath Lecture Audio Search Demo and Paper. A demonstration of results from the DPRL lab's unsupervised audio keyword search system is available online, along with an associated Pattern Recognition Letters paper published in Feb. 2016.

Math Search for the Masses (CICM Talk). I gave an invited talk on math search interfaces and search engines at the Conferences on Intelligent Computer Mathematics in Washington, DC (July, 2015; Math Search for the Masses). A YouTube video of the talk which I gave in the RIT Imaging Science Seminar Series is available online here.