Image-Matching for Revision Detection in Printed Historical Documents

In the research area of historical documents it is of high interest to reconstruct the process of the emergence of a historical typesetted document. Therefore, the chronological order of the different versions of a typesetted document has to be reconstructed. This is done by manually finding differences in two versions and then deciding on the order between these two versions. In this paper we present an approach to automate the search for differences in both images. This approach uses a globally optimal image matching technique to overlay both images and colors the differences accordingly. We also present a real-world application for this approach on digitized versions of a historical book. We wish to thank Prof. Wolfgang Neuser from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern for the interesting problem he presented to us and also for the valuable data we obtained.