Browsing by Subject "Historical Manuscripts"

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Open Access
Historical document analysis based on word matching
(2011) Arifoğlu, Damla
Historical documents constitute a heritage which should be preserved and providing automatic retrieval and indexing scheme for these archives would be beneficial for researchers from several disciplines and countries. Unfortunately, applying ordinary Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques on these documents is nearly impossible, since these documents are degraded and deformed. Recently, word matching methods are proposed to access these documents. In this thesis, two historical document analysis problems, word segmentation in historical documents and Islamic pattern matching in kufic images are tackled based on word matching. In the first task, a cross document word matching based approach is proposed to segment historical documents into words. A version of a document, in which word segmentation is easy, is used as a source data set and another version in a different writing style, which is more difficult to segment into words, is used as a target data set. The source data set is segmented into words by a simple method and extracted words are used as queries to be spotted in the target data set. Experiments on an Ottoman data set show that cross document word matching is a promising method to segment historical documents into words. In the second task, firstly lines are extracted and sub-patterns are automatically detected in the images. Then sub-patterns are matched based on a line representation in two ways: by their chain code representation and by their shape contexts. Promising results are obtained for finding the instances of a query pattern and for fully automatic detection of repeating patterns on a square kufic image collection.
Open Access
A Line-based representation for matching words
(2009) Can, Ethem Fatih
With the increase of the number of documents available in the digital environment, efficient access to the documents becomes crucial. Manual indexing of the documents is costly; however, and can be carried out only in limited amounts. Therefore, automatic analysis of documents is crucial. Although plenty of effort has been spent on optical character recognition (OCR), most of the existing OCR systems fail to address the challenge of recognizing characters in historical documents on account of the poor quality of old documents, the high level of noise factors, and the variety of scripts. More importantly, OCR systems are usually language dependent and not available for all languages. Word spotting techniques have been recently proposed to access the historical documents with the idea that humans read whole words at a time. In these studies the words rather than the characters are considered as the basic units. Due to the poor quality of historical documents, the representation and matching of words continue to be challenging problems for word spotting. In this study we address these challenges and propose a simple but effective method for the representation of word images by a set of line descriptors. Then, two different matching criteria making use of the line-based representation are proposed. We apply our methods on the word spotting and redif extraction tasks. The proposed line-based representation does not require any specific pre-processing steps, and is applicable to different languages and scripts. In word spotting task, our results provide higher scores than the existing word spotting studies in terms of retrieval and recognition performances. In the redif extraction task, we obtain promising results providing a motivation for further and advanced studies on Ottoman literary texts.
Open Access
Segmentation based Ottoman text and matching based Kufic image analysis
(2013) Adıgüzel, Hande
Large archives of historical documents attract many researchers from all around the world. The increasing demand to access those archives makes automatic retrieval and recognition of historical documents crucial. Ottoman archives are one of the largest collections of historical documents. Although Ottoman is not a currently spoken language, many researchers from all around the world are interested in accessing the archived material. This thesis proposes two Ottoman document analysis studies; first one is a crucial pre-processing task for retrieval and recognition which is segmentation of documents. Second one is a more specific retrieval and recognition problem which aims matching Islamic patterns is Kufic images. For the first segmentation task, layout, line and word segmentation is studied. Layout segmentation is obtained via Log-Gabor filtering. Four different algorithms are proposed for line segmentation and finally a simple morphological method is preferred for word segmentation. Datasets are constructed with documents from both Ottoman and other languages (English, Greek and Bangla) to test the script-independency of the methods. Experiments show that our segmentation steps give satisfactory results. The second task aims to detect Islamic patterns in Kufic images. The sub-patterns are considered as basic units and matching is used for the analysis. Graphs are preferred to represent subpatterns where graph and sub-graph isomorphism are used for matching them. Kufic images are analyzed in three different ways. Given a query pattern, all the instances of the query can be found through retrieval. Going further, through known patterns images can be automatically labeled in the entire dataset. Finally, patterns that repeat inside an image can be automatically discovered. As there is no existing Kufic dataset, a new one is constructed by collecting images from the Internet and promising results are obtained on this dataset.