A graph-based approach for transcribing ancient documents

Abstract

Over the last years, the interest in preserving digitally ancient documents has increased resulting in databases with a huge amount of image data. Most of these documents are not transcribed and thus querying operations are limited to basic searching. We propose a novel approach for transcribing historical documents and present results of our initial experiments. Our method divides a text-line image into frames and constructs a graph using the framed image. Then Dijkstra algorithm is applied to find the line transcription. Experiments show a character accuracy of 79.3%. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012.