Handwritten Text Recognition for Ancient Documents

Alfons Juan, Verónica Romero, Joan Andreu Sánchez, Nicolás Serrano, Alejandro H. Toselli and Enrique Vidal; JMLR W&CP 11:58-65, 2010.

Abstract

Huge amounts of legacy documents are being published by on-line digital libraries world wide. However, for these raw digital images to be really useful, they need to be transcribed into a textual electronic format that would allow unrestricted indexing, browsing and querying. In some cases, adequate transcriptions of the handwritten text images are already available. In this work three systems are presented to deal with this sort of documents. The first two address two different approaches for semi-automatic transcription of document images. The third system implements an alignment method to find mappings between word images of a handwritten document and their respective words in its given transcription.