e-Crowds: A Mobile Platform for Browsing and Searching in Historical Demography-Related Manuscripts

Abstract

This paper presents a prototype system running on portable devices for browsing and word searching through historical handwritten document collections. The platform adapts the paradigm of eBook reading, where the narrative is not necessarily sequential, but centered on the user actions. The novelty is to replace digitally born books by digitized historical manuscripts of marriage licenses, so document analysis tasks are required in the browser. With an active reading paradigm, the user can cast queries of people names, so he/she can implicitly follow genealogical links. In addition, the system allows combined searches: the user can refine a search by adding more words to search. As a second contribution, the retrieval functionality involves as a core technology a word spotting module with an unified approach, which allows combined query searches, and also two input modalities: queryby-example, and query-by-string.

Probabilistic multi-word spotting in handwritten text images

“…An example of this approach is [21], which presents a (segmentation-based) KWS approach for multi-word queries formulated only with AND/OR Boolean operations. However this approach has two main drawbacks: First, it requires a (perfect in the experiments of [21]) segmentation of all the images into individual words, which is obviously not affordable in practice for large image collections. And second, the implementation of the AND operation is inconsistent in probabilistic terms.…”