Development of a database with ground truth for old documents analysis

Standard databases play essential roles for evaluating and comparing results obtained by different groups of researchers. In this paper, a database of images derived from the Tunisian heritage is introduced. We present first the importance of digitization for the preservation and the protection of patrimonial collections. Then, we describe the development process of our database, intended for the analysis of historical document images, in collaboration with the National Archives of Tunisia. In the second place, we demonstrate the importance of the ground truth for image databases and the annotation impact of these images. Thus, we present our approach for images annotation which consists in producing manually and collectively keywords for each image.