Indexing and searching collections of handwritten archival documents and manuscripts has always been a challenge because handwriting recognizers do not perform well on such noisy documents. Given a collection of documents written by a single author (or a few authors), one can apply a technique called word spotting. The approach is to cluster word images based on their visual appearance, after s...

The amount of digitized legacy documents has been rising dramatically over the last years due mainly to the increasing number of on-line digital libraries publishing this kind of documents. The vast majority of them remain waiting to be transcribed into a textual electronic format (such as ASCII or PDF) that would provide historians and other researchers new ways of indexing, consulting and que...

We present multi-column text region identification support for Ocular, the unsupervised historical printed document transcription project of Berg-Kirkpatrick et. al (2013). We use structured prediction with rich features defined on the input document and incorporate a transition model based on prior document layout assumptions. Our model is trained using a structured-SVM objective on a randomly...

Historical documents play a vital role in understanding our past and hence need to be preserved. Over the period, these documents tend to possess many variations like stains, strain, ink seepage, dust etc. Image enhancement techniques can be utilized to improve the quality of these images by removing noise and increasing contrast range. The proposed method mainly deals with enhancing the histor...

We describe our work on text-image alignment in context of building a historical document retrieval system. We aim at aligning images of words in handwritten lines with their text transcriptions. The images of handwritten lines are automatically segmented from the scanned pages of historical documents and then manually transcribed. To train automatic routines to detect words in an image of hand...

The European Community project COLLATE (Collaboratory for Annotation, Indexing and Retrieval of Digitized Historical Archive Material) is concerned with digitised historical/cultural material. One of the main features of COLLATE system architecture is the integration of software components that exploit state-of-the-art techniques coming from the area of Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Rep...

The implementation of word spotting is not an easy procedure and it gets even worse in the case of historical documents since it requires character recognition and indexing of the document images. A general technique for word spotting is presented, independent of OCR, using automatic representation of the text queries of the user by word images and comparing them with the word images extracted ...

This paper focuses on a set of structured document applications that we have denoted databases of historical documents. The information into these documents is closely related to the time in which they are created while being still of great usefulness in the future. The main contribution of this paper is the formulation of a group of operators and predicates that express retrieval conditions ov...