Vincent Christlein

Dr.-Ing. Vincent Christlein

Researcher

Department of Computer Science
Chair of Computer Science 5 (Pattern Recognition)

Room: Room 09.135
Martensstraße 3
91058 Erlangen

http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0455-3799

Our handwriting imitation works

Academic CV

Vincent Christlein studied Computer Science, graduated in 2012 and received his PhD (Dr.-Ing.) in 2018 from the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Germany. During his studies, he worked on automatic handwriting analysis with focus on writer identification and writer retrieval. Since 2018, he has been working as a research associate at the Pattern Recognition Lab (FAU) and was promoted to Academic Councilor in 2020. He heads the Computer Vision group, which covers a wide variance of topics, e.g. environmental projects such as glacier segmentation or solar cell crack recognition, but also computational humanities topics, such as document and art analysis.

Awards

2023

Best Poster Award for the paper:
Seuret, M.; van der Loop, J.; Weichselbaumer, N.; Mayr, M.; Molnar, J.; Hass T; Christlein V.: “Combining OCR Models for Reading Early Modern Books”,
17th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), 2023

 

2021

Best Student Paper Award for the paper:
Mattick, A.; Mayr, M.; Seuret, M.; Maier, A.; Christlein, V.: “SmartPatch: Improving Handwritten Word Imitation iwth Patch Discriminators”,
16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), 2021

 

2020

Best Student Paper Award (Honorable Mention) for the paper:
Leipert, M.; Vogeler, G.; Seuret M.; Maier A.; Christlein, V.: “The Notary in the Haystack – Countering Class Imbalance in Document Processing with CNNs”,
14th IAPR workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS), 2020.

 

2018
Best Student Paper Award for the paper:
Stromer D., Christlein V., Huang X., Zippert P., Helmecke E., Hausotte T., Maier A.:
“Non-Destructive Digitization of Soiled Historical Chinese Bamboo Scrolls”,
13th IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS), 2018

 

2017

IEEE SPS Award: on behalf of IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) for the paper:
Christlein, Vincent; Riess, Christian; Jordan, Johannes; Riess, Corinna; Angelopoulou, Elli: “An Evaluation of Popular Copy-Move Forgery Detection Approaches”, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 1841-1854, 2012
The SPS Best Paper Award is regularly given to high impact journal papers in the last five years and is based on a nomination from the respective IEEE Technical Committee.
Competition Winner: ICDAR2017 Competition on the Classification of Medieval Handwritings in Latin Script: Task 2 (Style classification on heterogeneously encoded data) and Task 4 (Manuscript dating on heterogeneously encoded data)

 

2016

Competition Winner: ICFHR2016 Competition on Multi-Script Writer Demographics Classification Using “QUWI” Database: Task 1 (Writer Identification) and Task 3 (Handedness Classification)
Competition Winner: ICFHR2016 Competition on the Classification of Medieval Handwritings in Latin Script: Task 1 (Accuracy)

 

2015

Best Poster Award for a very significant contribution in the field of document analysis and recognition for the paper:
V. Christlein, D. Bernecker and E. Angelopoulou, “Writer identification using VLAD encoded contour-Zernike moments,” 2015 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), 2015

Competition Winner: ICDAR 2015 Competition on Multi-Script Writer Identification and Gender Classification (Task 1 Writer identification)

 

2014

Competition Winner: ICFHR2014 Competition on Arabic Writer Identification Using AHTID/MW and KHATT Databases (Task 3 Writer identification using the KHATT datasbase)

Datasets

Projects

2023

  • Erfassung von Vögeln und Meeressäugetieren in Luftbildsequenzen mittels Verfahren der künstlichenIntelligenz

    (Third Party Funds Single)

    Term: July 1, 2023 - June 30, 2026
    Funding source: Bundesministerien
  • Großräumige automatische Segmentierung der Kalbungsfront und Analyse der frontalen Ablation arktischer Gletscher mit Hilfe von Synthetic-Aperture-Radar-Bildsequenze

    (Third Party Funds Single)

    Term: October 1, 2023 - September 30, 2026
    Funding source: DFG-Einzelförderung / Sachbeihilfe (EIN-SBH)

2022

  • International Doctoral Program: Measuring and Modelling Mountain glaciers and ice caps in a Changing Climate (M³OCCA)

    (Third Party Funds Single)

    Term: June 1, 2022 - May 31, 2026
    Funding source: Elitenetzwerk Bayern

    Mountain glaciers and ice caps outside the large ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica contribute about 41% to the global sea level rise between 1901 to 2018 (IPCC 2021). While the Arctic ice masses are and will remain the main contributors to sea level rise, glacier ice in other mountain regions can be critical for water supply (e.g. irrigation, energy generation, drinking water, but also river transport during dry periods). Furthermore, retreating glaciers also can cause risks and hazards by floods, landslides and rock falls in recently ice-free areas. As a consequence, the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) dedicates special attention to the cryosphere (IPCC 2019; IPCC 2021). WMO and UN have defined Essential Climate Variables (ECV) for assessing the status of the cryosphere and its changes. These ECVs should be measured regularly on large scale and are essential to constrain subsequent modelling efforts and predictions.
    The proposed International Doctorate Program (IDP) “Measuring and Modelling Mountain glaciers and ice caps in a Changing ClimAte (M3OCCA)” will substantially contribute to improving our observation and measurement capabilities by creating a unique inter- and transdisciplinary research platform. We will address main uncertainties of current measurements of the cryosphere by developing new instruments and future analysis techniques as well as by considerably advancing geophysical models in glaciology and natural hazard research. The IDP will have a strong component of evolving techniques in the field of deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI) as the data flow from Earth Observation (EO) into modelling increases exponentially. IDP M3OCCA will become the primary focal point for mountain glacier research in Germany and educate emerging
    talents with an interdisciplinary vision as well as excellent technical and soft skills. Within the IDP we combine cutting edge technologies with climate research. We will develop future technologies and transfer knowledge from other disciplines into climate and glacier research to place Bavaria at the forefront in the field of mountain cryosphere research. IDP M3OCCA fully fits into FAU strategic goals and it will leverage on Bavaria’s existing long-term commitment via the super test site Vernagtferner in the Ötztal Alps run by Bavarian Academy of Sciences (BAdW). In addition, we cooperate with the University of Innsbruck and its long-term observatory at Hintereisferner. At those super test sites, we will perform joint measurements, equipment tests, flight campaigns and cross-disciplinary trainings and exercises for our doctoral researchers. We leverage on existing
    instrumentation, measurements and time series. Each of the nine doctoral candidates will be guided by interdisciplinary, international teams comprising university professors, senior scientists and emerging talents from the participating universities and external research organisations.

  • ´Werck der bücher’ Transitions, experimentation, and collaboration in reprographic technologies, 1440–1470

    (Third Party Funds Single)

    Term: June 1, 2022 - May 31, 2025
    Funding source: DFG-Einzelförderung / Sachbeihilfe (EIN-SBH)

2021

  • Font Group Recognition for Improved OCR

    (Third Party Funds Single)

    Term: August 1, 2021 - August 1, 2023
    Funding source: DFG-Einzelförderung / Sachbeihilfe (EIN-SBH)

    Although OCR-D made huge progress in the last project phase in providing OCR for early printed books, it still faces two major problems: The huge variety of the material makes it extremely challenging to use generic OCR-models. Yet, selecting specific models is not possible as the sheer amount of material prevents a fully automatic workflow. This situation is further complicated by the lack of appropriate OCR training data. Current data sets consist overwhelmingly of texts in Fraktur, especially from the 19th century. This completely neglects the large typographic variety displayed by printing in the three previous centuries. Therefore, and in response to the demand from SLUB Dresden and ULB Halle, we propose to improve the current situation significantly1) fine tuning our font group recognition system to such a degree that it can be used at character level;2) transcribing more specific OCR training data for the 16th-18th century, which includes popular fonts such as Schwabacher, other bastards and old Fraktur styles; 3) training font-specific OCR models as well as integrated models that recognise both typeface and text simultaneously. This approach has ensured in other contexts that the network performs better on both individual tasks, as we can thus reduce overfitting during training. This project will improve OCR quality significantly, especially for books in non-Fraktur fonts. It will also provide a training data set of very high quality that can be reused in long term. Finally, the project will provide a more fine-grained font recognition tool that, beyond enabling font-specific OCR, also has important applications in text attribute recognition and layout analysis.

2019

  • Kommunikation und Sprache im Reich. Die Nürnberger Briefbücher im 15. Jahrhundert: Automatische Handschriftenerkennung - historische und sprachwissenschaftliche Analyse.

    (Third Party Funds Single)

    Term: October 1, 2019 - September 30, 2022
    Funding source: DFG-Einzelförderung / Sachbeihilfe (EIN-SBH)

2018

  • Critical Catalogue of Luther Portraits (1519-1530)

    (Third Party Funds Group – Overall project)

    Term: June 1, 2018 - May 31, 2021
    Funding source: andere Förderorganisation
    URL: https://www.gnm.de/forschung/projekte/luther-bildnisse/

    Quite a number of portraits of Martin Luther - known as media star of 16th century – can be found in today’s museums and libraries. However, how many portraits indeed exist and which of those are contemporary or actually date from a later period? So far unlike his works, however, the variety of contemporary portraits (painting and print) is neither completely collected nor critically analyzed. Thus, a joint project of the FAU, the Germanisches Nationalmuseum (GNM) in Nuremberg and the Technology Arts Sciences (TH Köln) was initiated. Goal of the interdisciplinary project covering art history, art technology, reformation history and computer science is the creation of a critical catalogue of Luther portraits (1519-1530). In particular, the issues of authenticity, dating of artworks and its historical usage context as well as the potential existence of serial production processes will be investigated.

  • Similarity learning for art analysis

    (Third Party Funds Group – Sub project)

    Overall project: Critical Catalogue of Luther Portraits (1519-1530)
    Term: June 1, 2018 - February 28, 2021
    Funding source: andere Förderorganisation
    URL: https://www.gnm.de/forschung/forschungsprojekte/luther-bildnisse/

    The analysis of the similarity of portraits is an important issue for many sciences such as art history or digital humanities, as for instance it might give hints concerning serial production processes, authenticity or temporal and contextual classification of the artworks.
    In the project, first algorithms will be developed for cross-genre and multi-modal registration of portraits to overlay digitized paintings and prints as well as paintings acquired with different imaging systems such as visual light photography and infrared reflectography. Then, methods will be developed to objectively analyze the portraits according to their similarity.
    This project is part of a joint project of the FAU, the Germanisches Nationalmuseum (GNM) in Nuremberg and the Technology Arts Sciences (TH Köln) in Cologne. Goal of the interdisciplinary project covering art history, art technology, reformation history and computer science is the creation of a critical catalogue of Luther portraits (1519-1530).

Publications

2024

Journal Articles

2023

Authored Books

Journal Articles

Book Contributions

Conference Contributions

2022

Journal Articles

Conference Contributions

2021

Journal Articles

Conference Contributions

2020

Journal Articles

Book Contributions

Conference Contributions

2019

Journal Articles

Conference Contributions

Thesis

2018

Journal Articles

Book Contributions

Edited Volumes

Conference Contributions

2017

Journal Articles

Book Contributions

Conference Contributions

Miscellaneous

2016

Journal Articles

Conference Contributions

2015

Conference Contributions

2014

Conference Contributions

2013

Conference Contributions

2012

Journal Articles

2010

Conference Contributions

Talks

2023

Christlein, Vincent
Pose Estimation for Artworks Retrieval
at Fostering Collaborative Breakthroughs in Heritage Science Through Machine Learning and Data Science, SCAI, Sorbonne University, Paris (19.6.)

Christlein, Vincent
Odeuropa und der Duft der Bilder
at Wie riecht Heimat?, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, München (8.5.)

Christlein, Vincent
Neural Networks & Deep Learning
at MOCCA Seminar, Tennenlohe, Erlangen (25.2.)

2022

Christlein, Vincent
Pose Estimation for Artworks Retrieval
at Training the Archive – Konferenz zu Kunst und Algorithmen, Ludwig Forum Aachen, Aachen (18.11.)

Christlein, Vincent
Document Analysis and Handwriting Generation
at University Rostock (27.10.)

Christlein, Vincent
Maschinelles Lernen zur Analyse von historischen Dokumenten
at Post aus Nürnberg, Die Briefbücher des 15. Jahrhunderts, Interdisziplinäre Tagung, Nürnberg (08.07.)

Christlein, Vincent
Automatische (Textunabhängige) Schreiberidentifizierung
at Tagung der Gesellschaft für forensische Schriftuntersuchung, Königswinter (17.06.)

Christlein, Vincent
Maschinelles Lernen zur Analyse historischer Dokumente
at Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften, Erlangen (21.05.)

Christlein, Vincent
Machine Learning for the Analysis of Artworks and Historical Documents
at Digital Humanities and Artificial Intelligence (DHAI) Seminar (10.05.)

Christlein, Vincent; Mayr, Martin
Handwriting Generation
at Weihnachtskolloquium 2020/21, AG OCR (25.01.)

2021

Christlein, Vincent
Maschinelles Lernen zur Bilddatenanalyse von Historischen Dokumenten
at Ringvorlesung “Materialität in den Historischen Grundwissenschaften – Aktuelle Technologien, die Digital Humanities und neue Wege der Forschung”, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich (17.11.)

Christlein, Vincent
Handwriting Analysis and Generation
at Lunchtime Lectures, University of Graz (30.06.)

Christlein, Vincent; Mayr, Martin
Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) – Entwicklung und aktuelle Ansätze der Handschriftenerkennung
at Weihnachtskolloquium 2020/21, AG OCR (21.01.)

2020

Christlein, Vincent
Automatische Schreiberidentifizierung in historischen Dokumenten
at “Digital History”, Digitale Geschichtswissenschaften an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (09.11.)

Christlein, Vincent; Stromer, Daniel
How to Read the Unreadable? Non-Invasive digitization of cultural heritage
at Dark Archives Conference 2020 (09.09.)

Christlein, Vincent; Weichselbaumer, Nikolaus
The rapid rise of Fraktur
at University of Paderborn (DHd2020) in Paderborn (05.03)

Christlein, Vincent
Writer Identification in Historical Document Images
at Universität Basel, Switzerland (Neo-Palaeography: Analysing Ancient Handwritings in the Digital Age) in Basel (21.01)

2019

Christlein, Vincent
Automatische Bilddatenanalyse von Historischen Dokumenten
at Mathematikon, University of Heidelberg (GG3D19: Graphdatenbanken, GIS und 3D-Modelle in der Bauforschung des Mittelalters) in Heidelberg (5.12.)

Christlein, Vincent
Deep Generalized Max-Pooling
at Sydney, Australia (International Conference on Document Analaysis and Recognition) in Sydney (25.09)

at Faculty of English, Oxford (Dark Archives: A Conference on the Medieval Unread and Unreadable) in Oxford (11.09)

Christlein, Vincent
Maschinelles Lernen zur bildbasierten Dokumentenanalyse
at Digital Humanities (Digital Humanities Cologne Colloquium) in University of Cologne (09.05)

Tutorial: Deep Learning Fundamentals
at Institut für Medizinische Informatik, Universität zu Lübeck (Workshop Bildverarbeitung für die Medizin) in Lübeck (17.03)
2018

Christlein, Vincent
Encoding CNN Activations for Writer Recognition

at TU Wien (13th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS)) in Wien (24.04)

Deep Learning: Fundamentals
at Lehrstuhl für Mustererkennung (Bildverarbeitung für die Medizin) in Erlangen (11.03)
at Exzellenzcluster (GI-Workshop: Im Spannungsfeld zwischen Tool-Building und Forschung auf Augenhöhe – Informatik und die Digital Humanities) in Berlin (25.09)
Handwriting Analysis with Focus on Writer Recognition
at Universität Hamburg (Invited Talk) in Informatikum Stellingen, Hamburg (26.10)
at Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (Time Machine Conference 2018) in Lausanne (30.10)
Visuelles Suchen in historischen Dokumenten – Herausforderungen und Möglichkeiten (Visual Retrieval in Historical Documents – Challenges and Possibilities)
at ZIP O.P.S. (Archivrecherchen im 21. Jahrhundert) in Stift Teplá (08.11)
Writer Recognition in Historical Documents
at Stadtarchäologie Wien (Congress Visual Heritage 2018) in Rathaus, Wien (14.11)

 

2017

Christlein, Vincent
Classification of Medieval Handwritten Script
at Interdisziplinäre Zentrum Editionswissenschaften (IZED), Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Workshop Digitale Paläographie) in Erlangen (31.01)

Christlein, Vincent; Ghesu, Florin Cristian; Maier, Andreas; Würfl, Tobias; Isensee, Fabian; Maier-Hein, Klaus; Neher, Peter; Kohl, Simon
Deep Learning: Advancing the State-of-the-Art in Medical Image Analysis
at Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum in der Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft (Bildverarbeitung für die Medizin 2007) in Heidelberg (12.03)
Automatic Handwriting Analysis – From Scribe to Script Type Classification
at Ecole Nationale des Chartes (Seminaire e-Philologie) in Paris (27.03)
at IAPR (14th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR)) in Kyoto, Japan (15.11)
2016

Christlein, Vincent
Writer Retrieval and its Application to Music Scores
at Bach-Archiv (DHD 2016 – Komponisten-Datenbanken/-Portale: Austauschformate und Vernetzungspotentiale (Pre-conference Workshop)) in Leipzig (08.03)

Automatic Detection of Illuminated Charters
at Uni Graz (Illuminated Charters – from the Margins of two Disciplines to the Core of Digital Humanities) in Wien (12.09)
From Script to Type Identification
at Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Workshop) in Berlin (06.09)

Weichselbaumer, Nikolaus; Christlein, Vincent
Automatische Typenbestimmung in historischen Drucken
at Universität Leipzig (Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum (DHd 2016)) in Leipzig (09.03)

2015
Computergestützte Verfahren zur Analyse von hochmittelalterlichen Papsturkunden
at FAU (Papstgeschichte des hohen Mittelalters: digitale und hilfswissenschaftliche Zugangsweisen zu einer Kulturgeschichte Europas) in Erlangen (20.02)
at RWTH (German Conference on Pattern Recognition) in Aachen (08.10)
at Universität Leipzig (Doctoral Seminar) in Leipzig (05.11)
Technische Hilfsmittel zur Analyse von Papsturkunden des hohen Mittelalters
at FAU (Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für Editionswissenschaften (IZED)) in Erlangen (26.01)
(13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR)) in Nancy, France (24.08)
2014
at Universität Trier (Tagung – Möglichkeiten der Automatischen Manuskriptanalyse) in Trier (25.02)
at IEEE (2014 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)) in Steamboat Springs, CO (26.03)

 

2013

Christlein, Vincent
(A Letter Driven) Writer Identification in Medieval Papal Charters
at University of Leeds (International Medieval Congress 2013) in Leeds (02.07)

Script and Signs. A Computer-based Analysis of High Medieval Papal Charters. A Key to Europe’s Cultural History
at FAU (Workshop on Automatic Pattern Recognition and Historical Document Analysis) in Erlangen (14.06)
Writer Identification in Medieval Papal Charters

at King’s College London (DigiPal Symposium III) in London (16.09)

2012

Christlein, Vincent
Handschrift und EDV – Möglichkeiten der Mustererkennung für paläographische Studien
at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg (Zugangsweisen zur päpstlichen Schriftlichkeit) in Lehrstuhl für Mittelalterliche Geschichte und Historische Hilfswissenschaften (14.07)

2010

Christlein, Vincent
A Study on Features for the Detection of Copy-Move Forgeries
at Gesellschaft für Informatik (Sicherheit 2010 – Sicherheit, Schutz und Zuverlässigkeit) in Berlin (06.10)

On Rotation Invariance in Copy-Move Forgery Detection

at IEEE (2nd IEEE Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS)) in Seattle, USA (15.12)

Lectures

No matching records found.

Student Theses

Open

Please see https://lme.tf.fau.de/teaching/thesis/

Running

Title Type Start/end date Student
Object Detection of more than 100,000 Industrial Parts MA thesis January 1, 2024 - July 1, 2024 Parteek Parteek
Reinforcement learning to learn mean average precision learning MA thesis December 1, 2023 - June 1, 2024 Murali Hemanna
AI-based generation of 2D vehicle geometries through Natural Language MA thesis October 20, 2023 - April 20, 2024 Naveed Unjum
Contrastive Learning for Glacier Segmentation Project June 19, 2023 - December 18, 2023 Marziyeh Mohammadi
Uncertainty Estimation for Transformer-based Glacier Segmentation Project June 1, 2022 - November 1, 2023 Julian Klink
Writer Verification/Identification using SuperPoint and SuperGlue BA thesis May 16, 2022 - October 17, 2022 Alexander Klingebiel

Finished

Bachelor’s Theses: 17
Master’s Theses: 42