Glyph spotting for mediaeval handwritings by template matching

This paper reports on the analysis of different approaches in order to search for glyphs within handwritten mediaeval documents. As layout analysis methods are difficult to apply to the documents at hand, template matching methods are employed. A number of different shape descriptions are used to filter out false positives, since the application of correlation coefficients alone results in too many matches. The overall goal consists in the interactive support of an editor who is transcribing a given handwriting. For this purpose, the automatic spotting of glyphs enables the editor to compare glyphs within different contexts.