Lambert Schomaker

Interests & projects

• Within artificial intelligence, my focus is on perceptual intelligence and machine learning
• Monk is our continuous project for allowing access to historical Dutch archives which are difficult to access by means of traditional OCR approaches due to their special fonts or handwritten style. Since 2009, Monk is one of the demonstrators in the Target project
• Ubbo Emmius' RERUM FRISICARUM HISTORIA (1616) Machine-print OCR on an important historical book (a GUF grant with Zweder von Martels & Arnold Meijster)
• NWO/Morph: Learning to learn: An Adaptive Reading System using a High-Performance Morphed-Image Correlator
  
• NWO/CATCH, sub project Scratch (SCRipt Analysis Tools for the Cultural Heritage): Historical document analysis, together with the Nationaal Archief.
  
• Biologically inspired image features (Poggio/Serre) are strong in whole-word recognition
• Off-line writer identification
  • NWO/ToKeN TriGraph:
    
  • The hinge transform for writer identification, by Bulacu & Schomaker (2003; 2007).
  • The allographic fraglet codebooks for writer identification, by Schomaker & Bulacu (2004).
  • We are distributing a MS Windows program for forensic and paleographic writer identification, to beta testers: GIWIS
• In 2012, we will start a project in the computer-based dating of mediaeval handwritten manuscripts, in a Dutch NWO project "MPS - The Mediaeval Paleographic Scale", together with paleographer prof. dr. Jan Burgers from the Huygensinstituut, The Hague. We will use models and methods collected in the area of writer identification.
• Our recognizer of mixed-styles online handwriting
  • ... as used in the Scryption museum (2000).
  • Handwriting recognition (on-line cursive) at NICI until 2001
• Methods: Neural networks, SVMs, Multiple agents, Genetic algorithms, finding proper distance measures for nearest-neighbour search
• Content and object-based image search
• Brain-Computer Interfacing
• Autonomous Systems / camera-based text detection by robots

Activities

• Previous
• Current
• News on Research
• Old newspaper snippets
• Miscellaneous

• Publications,
  • Abstracts,
  • Papers,
  • Slides
• People at our institute
• Former M.Sc. Students
• Ph.D. involvement
• Other committees
• Courses

Researchers and scientific programmers

• Tapan Bhowmik (Target project, HMMs & historical manuscript recognition)
• Arnold Meijster (high-performance computing, image processing)
• Aswin van Woudenberg (writer identification/implementation)
• Edzer Lawerman (database and I/O optimization, seconded, NSpyre)

Ph.D. students

• Jean-Paul van Oosten (Markov modeling of active recognition)
  He has obtained, at the ICFHR 2012, the IAPR Best Paper Award: Jean-Paul Van Oosten, Lambert Schomaker (2010). Separability versus Prototypicality in Handwritten Word Retrieval, Proc. Int. Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, September 18-20 2012, Bari, Italy, IEEE Computer Society, pp. 8-13, DOI 10.1109/ICFHR.2012.269
• Marius Bulacu (writer identification, dissertation 2007)
• Tijn van der Zant (handwritten historical document retrieval, dissertation 2010)
• Axel Brink (robust writer identification and verification, dissertation 2011)
• Gert Kootstra (biologically inspired robot vision and navigation, dissertation 2010)
• Hado van Hasselt (reinforcement learning systems, with Marco Wiering, dissertation 2011)

Current M.Sc. students

• Marianne Ritsema van Eck (semantic modeling of 15th century Alderman's acts for improval of handwriting recognition)

• M.Sc. project topics
• more M.Sc. project topics

  [remote supervision]

School of Computing and Cognition

I heartily welcome International Students to take a look at our programmes.