A Semi-Automatic Approach of old Arabic Documents Indexing

indexing is a largely used technique in retrieval systems. It has as goal to extract and to represent the meaning of a document so that it can be found by the user. We can cite two types of indexing: manual indexing, and automatic indexing. The automatic indexing requires to use character and words recognition engines which work only over the texts of contemporary documents. In this paper, we propose a semiautomatic approach of old Arabic documents images indexing and searching without resorting to recognize their contents in order to deal with the incapacity of the recognition techniques to understand the contents of old documents. The proposed approach repose on the representation of the documents according to the structural features of their indexes chosen manually from each document by an expert. The approach is tested on a sample of approximately 1100 envelopes and shows good results. Keywords-component; indexing, old documents, structural features, documents analysis