Elisa Barney Smith of Luleå University of Technology (LTU)

Documents are all around us. Currently most documents are born digital and many may remain in digital form for their entire lifespan. Other documents appear on paper at some point in their lives, and there is often a need to bring them into the digital world. On cleanly printed and clearly photographed documents, documents with simple layouts convert to digital form well. For other documents, a significant amount of research remains.

There is more to the process than just recognizing individual letters. The process starts with image processing, then the letters and words are recognized. The relationships between letters, words, sentences, paragraphs and pages need to be understood. Equations and figures have a two-dimensional structure that needs to be interpreted and then related to the document structure.

Join us to learn about the various components in a Document Image Analysis (DIA) system, including some of the machine learning techniques used in the process, and how processes vary for modern versus historical documents, and machine print versus handwritten documents.

Biography:

Elisa Barney Smith is a professor at Luleå University of Technology (LTU), Sweden which she joined after a 22 year career in the Electrical & Computer Engineering department at Boise State University in Boise Idaho USA. She is in LTU’s Machine Learning group in the Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering, Embedded Internet Systems Lab (EISLAB). She received a B.S. in Computer Science and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering all from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA.  Professor Barney’s main research interests are image processing and machine learning. She applies these primarily to document imaging as well as to facilitate image processing for disparate areas from biomedical image processing to materials science research to soil remediation evaluation. Her research in document analysis has included developing models of the degradations produced during document image acquisition, analyzing the defects that can be produced by the models, ballot image processing, handwritten Indic script recognition, and historical document image processing, recognition and analysis. Some of this work was featured in a TEDxBoise talk (available on YouTube).  Professor Barney has worked on numerous cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional, national and international project teams. Her expertise has given her invitations as a paid guest scientist at the NATO Saclant Center in Italy, the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris, France, LORIA in Nancy France and the Technical University Dortmund in Germany. Professor Barney co-authored a textbook on machine learning. She has received NSF, NASA, and industry funding, including a prestigious NSF CAREER award.  Elisa Barney Smith is a member of International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR) and a Senior Member of IEEE and SPIE. She is past chair of the IEEE Boise section, past IEEE Region 6’s North East Area chair, the 2019 & 2020 IEEE (global) Student Activities Committee (SAC) Chair, and has served on several global IEEE committees. She is a 2023-2025 IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor.

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