Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Scale Space Approach For Automatically Segmenting Words From Historical Handwritten Documents, R. Manmatha, Jamie L. Rothfeder

R. Manmatha

Many libraries, museums, and other organizations contain large collections of handwritten historical documents, for example, the papers of early presidents like George Washington at the Library of Congress. The first step in providing recognition/ retrieval tools is to automatically segment handwritten pages into words. State of the art segmentation techniques like the gap metrics algorithm have been mostly developed and tested on highly constrained documents like bank checks and postal addresses. There has been little work on full handwritten pages and this work has usually involved testing on clean artificial documents created for the purpose of research. Historical manuscript images, …