The purpose of this survey is to provide a comprehensive overview of recent advancements in text line segmentation and baseline detection techniques within the analysis of historical document images. Text line extraction is an essential step in the historical documents image analysis pipeline, as its results significantly impact the accuracy of subsequent processes, such as handwritten text recognition (HTR). Through a multi-stage procedure, we carefully selected 49 peer-reviewed studies published since 2019. Based on careful analysis of these studies, we summarize the information of the existing datasets, describe and categorize different methods, and summarize evaluation protocols. In addition, we compare the results of various methods on benchmark datasets. Finally, we highlight the gaps and suggest directions for future research. We believe that this comprehensive survey will be of great assistance to researchers working in the field of historical document image analysis, as it offers critical insights into the latest advancements and developments, providing a foundation for future research.

This work focuses on automatic gender and age prediction tasks from handwritten documents. This problem is of interest in a variety of fields, such as historical document analysis and forensic investigations. The challenge for automatic gender and age classification can be demonstrated by the relatively low performances of the existing methods. In addition, despite the success of CNN for gender classification, deep neural networks were never applied for age classification. The published works in this area mostly concentrate on English and Arabic languages. In addition to Arabic and English, this work also considers Hebrew, which was much less studied. Following the success of bilinear Convolutional Neural Network (B-CNN) for fine-grained classification, we propose a novel implementation of a B-CNN with ResNet blocks. To our knowledge, this is the first time the bilinear CNN is applied for writer demographics classification. In particular, this is the first attempt to apply a deep neural network for the age classification. We perform experiments on documents from three benchmark datasets written in three different languages and provide a thorough comparison with the results reported in the literature. B-ResNet was top-ranked in all tasks. In particular, B-ResNet outperformed other models on KHATT and QUWI datasets on gender classification.

This paper introduces a streamlined taxonomy for categorizing offensive language in Hebrew, addressing a gap in the literature that has, until now, largely focused on Indo-European languages. Our taxonomy divides offensive language into seven levels (six explicit and one implicit level). We based our work on the simplified offensive language (SOL) taxonomy introduced in (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk et al. 2021a) hoping that our adjustment of SOL to the Hebrew language will be capable of reflecting the unique linguistic and cultural nuances of Hebrew. The study involves both linguistic and cultural analysis beyond Natural Language Processing (NLP). We employed manual linguistic analysis to understand the nuances of offensive language in Hebrew.An accompanying dataset, gathered on Twitter and manually curated by human annotators, is described in detail. This dataset was constructed to both validate the taxonomy and serve as a foundation for future research on offensive language detection and analysis in Hebrew. Preliminary analysis of the dataset reveals intriguing patterns and distributions, underscoring the complexity and specificity of offensive expressions in the Hebrew language.The aim of our work is to capture the complexity and specificity of offensive expressions in Hebrew beyond what automated NLP methods alone can provide. Our findings highlight the significance of considering linguistic and cultural variations when researching and correcting abusive language online. We believe that our streamlined taxonomy and associated dataset will be crucial in improving research in Hebrew language sociocultural studies, natural language processing, and offensive language detection. Our study also makes a substantial contribution to the study of low-resource languages and can be used as a model for future research on other languages.

Plant classification requires the eye of an expert in botanics when the subtle differences in stem or petals differentiate between different species. Hence, an accurate automatic plant classification might be of great assistance to a person who studies agriculture, travels, or explores rare species. This paper focuses on a specific task of urban plants classification. The possible practical application of this work is a tool which assists people, growing plants at home, to recognize new species and to provide the relevant caring instructions. Because urban species are barely covered by the benchmark datasets, these species cannot be accurately recognized by the state-of-the-art pre-trained classification models. This paper introduces a new dataset, Urban Planter, for plant species classification with 1500 images categorized into 15 categories. The dataset contains 15 urban species, which can be grown at home in any climate (mostly desert) and are barely covered by existing datasets. We performed an extensive analysis of this dataset, aimed at answering the following research questions: (1) Does the Urban Planter dataset provide enough information to train accurate deep learning models? (2) Can pre-trained classification models be successfully applied on Urban Planter, and is the pre-training on ImageNet beneficial in comparison to the pre-training on a much smaller but more relevant dataset? (3) Does two-step transfer learning further improve the classification accuracy? We report the results of experiments designed to answer these questions. In addition, we provide the link to the installation code of the alpha version and the demo video of the web app for urban plants classification based on the best evaluated model. To conclude, our contribution is three-fold: (1) We introduce a new dataset of urban plant images; (2) We report the results of an extensive case study with several state-of-the-art deep networks and different configurations for transfer learning; (3) We provide a web application based on the best evaluated model. In addition, we believe that, by extending our dataset in the future to eatable plants and assisting people to grow food at home, our research contributes to achieve the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.