Digitalizing scheme of handwritten Hanja historical documents

In Korea, the historical archives of Lee dynasty have been digitized for years. Although the metallic pressing technology had been used in Korea as early as 13th century, most of these documents are written by the King´s chroniclers and secretaries. In addition, ancient characters which are not used in contemporary texts take considerable proportion. As a consequence, it is extremely difficult to utilize conventional OCR systems, and most of the process has been performed manually. However, this manual processing has been unsatisfactory in terms of costs and efficiency. As an alternative, we built a system that is composed of a dedicated handwritten Hanja recognizer and an easy-to-use verifier. Preliminary experiments show that the proposed system can help enhancing the overall efficiency of the process and reducing the costs.