Word Spotting as a Service: An Unsupervised and Segmentation-Free Framework for Handwritten Documents

Word spotting strategies employed in historical handwritten documents face many challenges due to variation in the writing style and intense degradation. In this paper, a new method that permits efficient and effective word spotting in handwritten documents is presented that relies upon document-oriented local features that take into account information around representative keypoints and a matching process that incorporates a spatial context in a local proximity search without using any training data. The method relies on a document-oriented keypoint and feature extraction, along with a fast feature matching method. This enables the corresponding methodological pipeline to be both effectively and efficiently employed in the cloud so that word spotting can be realised as a service in modern mobile devices. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method in terms of its matching accuracy, along with its fast retrieval time, respectively, are shown after a consistent evaluation of several historical handwritten datasets.

Spatial Distribution of Ink at Keypoints (SDIK): A Novel Feature for Word Spotting in Arabic Documents

This paper addresses the challenging task of word spotting in Arabic handwritten documents. We proposed a novel feature that we called Spatial Distribution of Ink at Keypoints (SDIK). The proposed feature captures the characteristics of Arabic handwriting concentrated at endpoints and branch points. SDIK feature quantizes the spatial repartition of ink pixels in the neighborhoods of keypoints. The resulting SDIK features are very fast to match, we take this advantage to match a query word with lines images rather than words images. By this matching mechanism, we overcome the hard task of segmenting an Arabic document into words. The method proposed in this study is tested on historical Arabic document with IBN SINA dataset and on modern handwriting with IFN/ENIT database. The obtained results are great of interest for retrieving query words in an Arabic document.

SHIBR—The Swedish Historical Birth Records: a semi-annotated dataset

This paper presents a digital image dataset of historical handwritten birth records stored in the archives of several parishes across Sweden, together with the corresponding metadata that supports the evaluation of document analysis algorithms’ performance. The dataset is called SHIBR (the Swedish Historical Birth Records). The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we believe it is the first and the largest Swedish dataset of its kind provided as open access (15,000 high-resolution colour images of the era between 1800 and 1840). We also perform some data mining of the dataset to uncover some statistics and facts that might be of interest and use to genealogists. Second, we provide a comprehensive survey of contemporary datasets in the field that are open to the public along with a compact review of word spotting techniques. The word transcription file contains 17 columns of information pertaining to each image (e.g., child’s first name, birth date, date of baptism, father's first/last name, mother’s first/last name, death records, town, job title of the father/mother, etc.). Moreover, we evaluate some deep learning models, pre-trained on two other renowned datasets, for word spotting in SHIBR. However, our dataset proved challenging due to the unique handwriting style. Therefore, the dataset could also be used for competitions dedicated to a large set of document analysis problems, including word spotting.