Word spotting in historical documents

We present new methods to retrieve words in historical handwritten documents. With the assumption that the words can be seen as images, we used the word spotting idea and search for the words in the documents using image retrieval techniques. Specifically, we proposed two methods, one based on the histogram of gradient orientations and one based on the correlation coefficient. We also proposed a new method by combining these two methods. In the experiments the data set consisting of George Washingtonpsilas handwritings is used.