Transcript mapping for historic handwritten document images

Abstract

There is a large number of scanned historical documents that need to be indexed for archival and retrieval purposes. A visual word spotting scheme that would serve these purposes is a challenging task even when the transcription of the document image is available. We propose a framework for mapping each word in the transcript to the associated word image in the document. Coarse word mapping based on document constraints is used for lexicon reduction. Then, word mappings are refined using word recognition results by a dynamic programming algorithm that finds the best match while satisfying the constraints.