This paper presents layout analysis for historical Arabic documents using siamese network. Given pages from different documents, we divide them into patches of similar sizes. We train a siamese network model that takes as an input a pair of patches and gives as an output a distance that corresponds to the similarity between the two patches. We used the trained model to calculate a distance matrix which in turn is used to cluster the patches of a page as either main text, side text or a background patch. We evaluate our method on challenging historical Arabic manuscripts dataset and report the F-measure. We show the effectiveness of our method by comparing with other works that use deep learning approaches, and show that we have state of art results.

In historical document image processing, datasets account for a significant part of any research, and are crucial for the diversity and abundance of experimental results, which contribute to the development of new algorithms to meet the new challenge. Moreover, they are very important for benchmarking processing algorithms. Numerous publicly available document image datasets of different languages have been emerged. However, current segmentation and recognition performances are nearly saturated with respect to the present publicly available datasets. As such, collecting and labelling historical document images is a burden on historical document image processing researchers. This paper introduces a public historical document image dataset, Pinkas dataset, with new challenges to open room for improvement and identify strengths and weaknesses of available processing algorithms. It is the first dataset in medieval handwritten Hebrew and fully labeled at word, line and page level by an expert of historical Hebrew manuscripts. Pinkas dataset contributes to the diversity of benchmarking standards. In this paper we present meta features of Pinkas dataset and apply recent word spotting algorithms to analyze the room for improvement in terms of performance.

We present a method for word spotting using convolutional siamese network. A convolutional siamese network employs two identical convolutional network to rank similarity between two input word images. Once the network is trained, it can then be used to spot not just words with varying writing styles and backgrounds but also to spot out of vocabulary words that are not in the training set. Experiments on the historical Arabic manuscript dataset VML, and on the George Washington dataset shows comparable results with the state of the art.