Word spotting: a new approach to indexing handwriting

There are many historical manuscripts written in a single hand which it would be useful to index. Examples include the W.B. DuBois collection at the University of Massachusetts and the early Presidential libraries at the Library of Congress. Since Optical Character Recognition (OCR) does not work well on handwriting, an alternative scheme based on matching the images of the words is proposed for indexing such texts. The current paper deals with the matching aspects of this process. Two different techniques for matching words are discussed. The first method matches words assuming that the transformation between the words may be modelled by a translation (shift). The second method matches words assuming that the transformation between the words may be modelled by an affine transform. Experiments are shown demonstrating the feasibility of the approach for indexing handwriting. The method should also be applicable to retrieving previously stored material from personal digital assistants (PDAs)