In patrimonial institutions such as libraries and archives, the valorization of the vast amount of documents that have been recently digitized is still a challenge. Most of these documents are freely accessible as images but their textual content remains largely unreachable and unknown. Research projects dedicated to specific collection allow creating meta-data or even transcriptions obtained through volunteers or crowd-sourcing. But the vast majority of the documents cannot be manually transcribed or indexed: automatic large-scale processes for indexing are needed. The increasing adoption of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) by the patrimonial institutions is a technological enabler for the development of such services. Images are accessible with a unique protocol across institutions and both images and data can be presented with standard tools. In this paper, we describe an architecture for automatic processing of historical documents owned by different institutions but processed and presented thanks to the IIIF framework. We implemented this architecture and processed a large collection of books of hours with a page classifier trained on an annotated sample. The result is freely distributed and can be viewed with any IIIF compatible viewer.

This competition investigates the performance of large-scale retrieval of historical document images based on writing style. Based on large image data sets provided by cultural heritage institutions and digital libraries, providing a total of 20 000 document images representing about 10 000 writers, divided in three types: writers of (i) manuscript books, (ii) letters, (iii) charters and legal documents. We focus on the task of automatic image retrieval to simulate common scenarios of humanities research, such as writer retrieval. The most teams submitted traditional methods not using deep learning techniques. The competition results show that a combination of methods is outperforming single methods. Furthermore, letters are much more difficult to retrieve than manuscripts.

Historical manuscripts are the main source of information about past. In recent years, digitization of large quantities of historical handwritten documents is in vogue. This trend gives access to a plethora of information about our medieval past. Such digital archives can be more useful if automatic indexing and retrieval of document images can be provided to the end users of a digital library. An automatic transcription of the full digital archive using traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is still not possible with sufficient accuracy. If full transcription is not available, the end users are interested in indexing and retrieving of particular document pages of their interest. Hence recognition of certain keywords from within the corpus will be sufficient to meet the end users needs. Recently, deep-learning based methods have shown competence in image classification problems. However, one bottleneck with deep-learning based techniques is that it requires a huge amount of training samples per class. Since the number of samples per word class is scarce for collections that are freshly scanned, this is a serious hindrance for direct usage of the deep-learning technique for the purpose of word image recognition in historical document images. This paper aims to investigate the problem of recognizing words from historical document images using a deep-learning based framework for feature extraction and classification while countering the problem of the low amount of image samples using off-line data augmentation techniques. Encouraging results (highest accuracy of 90.03%) were obtained while dealing with 365 different word classes.

Making large-scale collections of digitized historical documents searchable is being earnestly demanded by many archives and libraries. Probabilistically indexing the text images of these collections by means of keyword spotting techniques is currently seen as perhaps the only feasible approach to meet this demand. A vast medieval manuscript collection, written in both Latin and French, called "Chancery", is currently being considered for indexing at large. In addition to its bilingual nature, one of the major difficulties of this collection is the very high rate of abbreviated words which, on the other hand, are completely expanded in the ground truth transcripts available. In preparation to undertake full indexing of Chancery, experiments have been carried out on a relatively small but fully representative subset of this collection. To this end, a keyword spotting approach has been adopted which computes word relevance probabilities using character lattices produced by a recurrent neural network and a N-gram character language model. Results confirm the viability of the chosen approach for the large-scale indexing aimed at and show the ability of the proposed modeling and training approaches to properly deal with the abbreviation difficulties mentioned.

This paper presents the results of the ICDAR2017 Competition on the Classification of Medieval Handwritings in Latin Script (CLaMM), jointly organized by Computer Scientists and Humanists (paleographers). This work follows a competition at ICFHR2016 and aims at providing a rich annotated database of European medieval manuscripts to the community on Handwriting Analysis and Recognition. We proposed four independent classification tasks which attracted 10 registered teams, with 6 submitted classifiers from 4 participants. Those classifiers are trained on a set of 3540 images with their ground truths. In task 1 (Script classification) and task 3 (Date classification), the classifiers have been evaluated by a test set of 2000 greyscale, tiff, 300 dpi images. In task 2 (Script classification) and task 4 (Date classification), the test set consists of 1000 images in different formats, resolutions and color representation. The best scores are respectively 85.2% for task 1, 76.5% for task 2, 59% for task 3, and 49.9% for task 4. An analysis based on the matrix of confusion of each classifier is also given.

in this paper, we propose a study on the complexity measure of an object. It is based on the analysis of different details that may be limited by object contours. They may be holes or convexity evolution along the contour line. We focus in the same way on empty zones and filled zones. This study leads to a novel measure of the topology complexity - vacuity measure - that quantifies the relation between emptiness or space and objects. Based on the vacuity measure, we propose to define a novel shape descriptor and the associated dissimilarity measure. They can be applied in handwritten character analysis and in object recognition in general. The experiments are performed on a handwritten character dataset (ORIFLAMMS) and the object shape dataset (MPEG-7).

Written texts are both physical (signs, shapes and graphical systems) and abstract objects (ideas), whose meanings and social connotations evolve through time. To study this dual nature of texts, palaeographers need to analyse large scale corpora at the finest granularity, such as character shape. This goal can only be reached through an automatic segmentation process. In this paper, we present a method, based on Handwritten Text Recognition, to automatically align images of digitized manuscripts with texts from scholarly editions, at the levels of page, column, line, word, and character. It has been successfully applied to two datasets of medieval manuscripts, which are now almost fully segmented at character level. The quality of the word and character segmentations are evaluated and further palaeographical analysis are presented.