Abstract

We describe our efforts with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to provide a form of automated search of handwritten content within large digitized document archives. With a growing push towards the digitization of paper archives there is an imminent need to develop tools capable of searching the resulting unstructured image data as data from such collections offer valuable historical records that can be mined for information pertinent to a number of fields from the geosciences to the humanities. To carry out the search, we use a Computer Vision technique called Word Spotting. A form of content based image retrieval, it avoids the still difficult task of directly recognizing the text by allowing a user to search using a query image containing handwritten text and ranking a database of images in terms of those that contain more similar looking content. In order to make this search capability …

Date

October 8, 2012

Authors

Liana Diesendruck, Luigi Marini, Rob Kooper, Mayank Kejriwal, Kenton McHenry

Conference

2012 IEEE 8th International Conference on E-Science

Pages

1-10

Publisher

IEEE