Abstract: In this work we present a handwritten word spotting approach that takes advantage of the a priori known order of appearance of the query words. Given an ordered sequence of query word instances, the proposed approach performs a
sequence alignment with the words in the target collection. Although the alignment is quite sparse, i.e. the number of words in the database is higher than the query set, the improvement in the overall performance is sensitively higher than isolated word spotting. As application dataset, we use a collection of handwritten marriage licenses taking advantage of the ordered
index pages of family names.

Abstract: The aim of writer identification is determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of writers. In this paper we present a system for writer identification in old handwritten music scores. Even though an important amount of compositions contains handwritten text in the music scores, the aim of our work is to use only music notation to determine the author. The steps of the system proposed are the following. First of all, the music sheet is preprocessed and normalized for obtaining a single binarized music line, without the staff lines. Afterwards, 100 features are extracted for every music line, which are subsequently used in a k-NN classifier that compares every feature vector with prototypes stored in a database. By applying feature selection and extraction methods on the original feature set, the performance is increased. The proposed method has been tested on a database of old music scores from the 17th to 19th centuries, achieving a recognition rate of about 95%.

Abstract: Text line segmentation in handwritten documents is an important task in the recognition of historical documents. Handwritten document images contain text lines with multiple orientations, touching and overlapping characters between consecutive text lines and different document structures, making line segmentation a difficult task. In this paper, we present a new approach for handwritten text line segmentation solving the problems of touching components, curvilinear text lines and horizontally overlapping components. The proposed algorithm formulates line segmentation as finding the central path in the area between two consecutive lines. This is solved as a graph traversal problem. A graph is constructed using the skeleton of the image. Then, a path-finding algorithm is used to find the optimum path between text lines. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on a comprehensive dataset consisting of five databases: ICDAR2009, ICDAR2013, UMD, the George Washington and the Barcelona Marriages Database. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art considering the different types and difficulties of the benchmarking data.

Abstract: There are lots of historical handwritten documents with information that can be used for several studies and projects. The Document Image Analysis and Recognition community is interested in preserving these documents and extracting all the valuable information from them. Handwritten word-spotting is the pattern classification task which consists in detecting handwriting word images. In this work, we have used a query-by-example formalism: we have matched an input image with one or multiple images from handwritten documents to determine the distance that might indicate a correspondence. We have developed an approach based in characteristic Loci Features stored in a hash structure. Document images of the marriage licences of the Cathedral of Barcelona are used as the benchmarking database.