An efficient segmentation-free approach to assist old Greek handwritten manuscript OCR

摘要: Recognition of old Greek manuscripts is essential for quick and efficient content exploitation the valuable historical collections. In this paper, we focus on problem recognizing early Christian written in lower case letters. Based existence closed cavity regions majority characters character ligatures these scripts, propose a novel, segmentation-free, fast technique that assists recognition procedure by tracing most frequently appearing or ligatures. First, detect cavities exist body. Then, protrusions outer contour outline connected components contain are used classification area around to specific ligature. The proposed method gives highly accurate results offers great assistance handwritten manuscript OCR. We also provide additional OCR applications not only prove robustness but demonstrate its generic flavor segmentation text location tasks very difficult perform.