In this paper we present an approach for the automatic extraction of family relationships from a real-world collection of historical notary acts. We retrieve relationships such as husband wife, parent child, widow of, etc. We study two ways to deal with this problem. In our first approach, we identify all person names in a document, generate all potential candidate pairs of names and predict wh...

The objective of our work is to enable the reading of fragile scrolled historical parchments without the need to physically unravel them, thus providing valuable information to a wide range of scholarly disciplines. This problem has not been investigated by the computer vision community properly yet due to the need for parchment scanning technology: standard x-ray machinery is not sufficient as...

Documents serve an important role in understanding change in urban fabric. The available multidimensional (spatial, temporal and thematic) information in these documents narrate not only the various features of the elements of the urban fabric but also notifies their changes during time. CityGML standard is used to spatially and temporally represent the city objects. But it misses features to r...

We present an interactive application for browsing severely damaged documents and other cultural artefacts. Such documents often contain strong geometric distortions such as wrinkling, buckling, and shrinking and cannot be flattened physically due to the high risk of causing further damage. Previous methods for virtual restoration involve globally flattening a 3D reconstruction of the document ...

Huge amounts of handwritten historical documents are being published by digital libraries world wide. However, for these raw digital images to be really useful, they need to be annotated with informative content. State-of-the-art Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) approaches require an impressive training effort by expert paleographers. Our contribution is a scalable, end-to-end transcription w...

This paper presents quite a different version of the origins of the Red Cross from that officially recognised. On the basis of historical documents and statements of authors who are critical and attentive to the detail of the circumstances and events which gave rise to the Red Cross, it is possible to discern a surprising historical truth.

The National Taiwan University Library has built a digital library of historical documents about Taiwan. The content is unique in that it covers about 80% of all primary Chinese historical materials about Taiwan before 1895, and that they are all available in searchable full text, in addition to metadata. To make these materials more accessible to the research community, we have developed, in a...

We present a segmentation-free method to retrieve keywords from degraded historical documents. The proposed method works directly on the gray scale representation and does not require any pre-processing to enhance document images. The document images are subdivided into overlapping patches of varying sizes, where each patch is described by the bag-of-visual-words descriptor. The obtained patch ...

Historical documents are a relevant part of cultural heritage. It is well-established that this domain is very complex: data are often heterogeneous, semantically rich, and highly interlinked. For this reason, searching and linking them with related contents represents a challenging task. The use of Semantic Web technologies can provide innovative methods for more effective search and retrieval...