New Microfilm Reading Machines

Reading What Machines "Think"

In this paper, we want to farther advance the parallelism between models of the brain and computing machines. We want to apply the same idea underlying neuroimaging techniques to electronic computers. Applying this parallelism, we can address these two questions: (1) how far we can go with neuroimaging in understanding human mind? (foundational perspective); (2) can we understand what computers...

Microfilm Service Units

Newspaper Headlines Extraction from Microfilm Images

Automatic indexing is important for a digital library to provide digitized manuscripts of old document images and their electronic text. As an essential step in creating such a system, this paper discusses the issue of extracting headlines from old newspaper microfilms. Most research on document layout analysis has largely assumed relatively clean images. However microfilm images of old newspap...

Automatic Indexing of Newspaper Microfilm Images

This paper describes a proposed document analysis system that aims at automatic indexing of digitized images of old newspaper microfilms. This is done by extracting news headlines from microfilm images. The headlines are then converted to machine readable text by OCR to serve as indices to the respective news articles. A major challenge to us is the poor image quality of the microfilm as most i...

Audible Outputs of Reading Machines for the Blind

The objective of the research reported below is the improvement of the intelligibility and naturalness of speech produced by an automatic synthesis-by-rule system. Such a system would be a major component of a reading machine for the blind . Work is reported below on the development and testing of a synthesis program and of rules for synthesis, and on phonetic investigations in support of rule ...