Dedicated texture based tools for characterisation of old books

This paper deals with the development of suitable assistance tools for humanists and historians to help them retrieve information documents. This paper represents a part of this ambitious project and deals with the design of a pixel classification method for ancient typewritten documents. The approach presented here is based on a multiresolution map construction and analysis; for five resolutions we construct five different characterisation maps. All the maps are based on texture information (correlation of pixels orientations, grey level pixel density: etc). After the merging of these 25 maps, each pixel of the original image is described by a vector which allows the computing of a hierarchical classification. In order to avoid issues linked to the binarization process, ail maps are computed for grey level images. The system has been tested on a CESR database of ancient printed books of the Renaissance. The classification results are evaluated through several visual classification illustrations