On a Kaoh database system using fluency functions based automatic and jaggyless image coding

Kaoh is one of historical materials which plays an important role in the field of historical document research in Japan. In the research of Kaoh,the historian must visit various places in Japan to compile them, which is a major difficulty in Kaoh research. In addition, there exist approximately 400,000 Kaohs in Japan. This paper proposes a Kaoh database system using fluency functionalized images, for the purpose of compiling the Kaoh images and sharing them among the researchers via the Internet. Fluency functionalized image is the type of image that the contours of each region in the image are approximated with fluency functions. From the experimental results, it was shown that the images kept the shape characteristics of Kaoh images even after affine-transforms, and that the data size were much smaller compared with the original bitmap images.