Recognizing Degraded Handwritten Characters

In this paper, Slavonic manuscripts from the 11th century written in Glagolitic script are investigated. State-of-the-art optical character recognition methods produce poor results for degraded handwritten document images. This is largely due to a lack of suitable results from basic pre-processing steps such as binarization and image segmentation. Therefore, a new, binarization-free approach will be presented that is independent of pre-processing deficiencies. It additionally incorporates local information in order to recognize also fragmented or faded characters. The proposed algorithm consists of two steps: character classification and character localization. Firstly scale invariant feature transform features are extracted and classified using support vector machines. On this basis interest points are clustered according to their spatial information. Then, characters are localized and eventually recognized by a weighted voting scheme of pre-classified local descriptors. Preliminary results show that the proposed system can handle highly degraded manuscript images with background noise, e.g. stains, tears, and faded characters

Proposal to encode nine Cyrillic characters for Slavonic

This is a proposal to add several Cyrillic characters to the international character encoding standard Unicode. These additions were published in Unicode Standard version 6.1 in January 2012. This proposal includes characters that occur in medieval Church Slavonic manuscripts from the 10/11c to 17c CE

Ponomar Project Slavonic Computing Initiative Proposal to Encode Combining Glagolitic Letters in Unicode

Glagolitic, also known as “Glagolitsa”, is an alphabetic writing system used to record Church Slavonic and other Slavic languages. Originating in the 9 th century, it is the earliest known Slavonic alphabet. The creation of the alphabet is attributed to the younger of the teachers of the Slavs, St. Cyril

The Slavic Manuscripts in the Federal Republic of Germany

William R. Veder, Katholieke Universiteit, Nijmegen, Holland. No institutional affiliation is indicated for Heinz Miklas or Jaroslav N. Ščapov.This article, which appears under the section title of "ДѢЛО КЪНИЖЬНОѤ/Dielo k"nizh'noie" in Polata knigopisnaia 9, provides an inventory describing Slavic manuscripts in the Federal Republic of Germany.The inventory indicates the shelfmark, date, language, title, foliation, dimensions, and material (writing support) of the items where known, as well as references to publications about each item. Manuscripts are noted in the following cities: Bamberg, Berlin, Bonn, Erlangen, Göttingen, Hamburg, Hanover, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Limburgerhof, München, Bad Soden-Neuenhain, Stuttgart, Tübingen, Wolfenbüttel, Wertheim, Würzberg, and Freiberg. Languages represented include: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, French, German, Italian, Latin, Moldavian, Polabian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, and Lower Sorbian. The manuscripts range in date from the 10th to the 19th centuries. The list of references is on pages 52-58

Readability Enhancement and Palimpsest Decipherment of Historical Manuscripts

This paper presents image acquisition and readability enhancement techniques for historical manuscripts developed in the interdisciplinary project “The Enigma of the Sinaitic Glagolitic Tradition” (Sinai II Project).1 We are mainly dealing with parchment documents originating from the 10th to the 12th centuries from St. Cather- ine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai. Their contents are being analyzed, fully or partly transcribed and edited in the course of the project. For comparison also other mss. are taken into consideration. The main challenge derives from the fact that some of the manuscripts are in a bad condition due to various damages, e.g. mold, washed out or faded text, etc. or contain palimpsest (=overwritten) parts. Therefore, the manuscripts investigated are imaged with a portable multispectral imaging system. This non-invasive conservation technique has proven extremely useful for the exami- nation and reconstruction of vanished text areas and erased or washed o palimpsest texts. Compared to regular white light, the illumination with speci c wavelengths highlights particular details of the documents, i.e. the writing and writing material, ruling, and underwritten text. In order to further enhance the contrast of the de- graded writings, several Blind Source Separation techniques are applied onto the multispectral images, including Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and others. Furthermore, this paper reports on other latest developments in the Sinai II Project, i.e. Document Image Dewarping, Automatic Layout Analysis, the recent result of another project related to our work: the image processing tool Paleo Toolbar, and the launch of the series Glagolitica Sinaitica

CIP and ISBN Codes for the Registration of Manuscripts?

Heinz Miklas, Slavisches Seminar, Freiburg im Breisgau, GermanyThis paper was presented at the "International Data Bases for Medieval Manuscript Studies" conference at Katholieke Universiteit, Nijmegen, September 1987.The article discusses the possible assignment of ISBN or CIP* unique numbers to manuscripts in addition to the manuscript siglum, which is typically composed of the Fond + Ms. number. *(Cataloging in Publication record number issued by the Library of Congress for books that have not yet been published.

CIMA (Centre of Image and Material Analysis in Cultural Heritage), Vienna

CIMA ist eine interuniversitäre, international tätige Einrichtung, die im Spannungsfeld von Technik, Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften Forschung und wissenschaftliche Beratung betreibt. Zu Jahresbeginn 2014 wurde im Rahmen des HRSMProjekts Erschließung und Erhaltung von Kulturgut – Moderne bildgebende und materialanalytische Verfahren zur Visualisierung, Dokumentation und Klassifikation von Handschriften der Grundstein dafür gelegt