Abstract
Archives around the world have vast uncatalogued series of image bundles of digitized historical manuscripts containing, among others, notarial records also known as “deeds” or “acts”. One of the first steps to provide metadata which describe the contents of those bundles is to segment these bundles into their individual deeds. Even if deeds are page-aligned, as in the bundles considered in the present work, this is a time-consuming task, often prohibitive given the huge scale of the manuscript series involved. Unlike traditional Layout Analysis methods for page-level segmentation, our approach goes beyond the realm of a single-page image, providing consistent deed detection results on full bundles. This is achieved in two tightly integrated steps: first, the probabilities that each bundle image is an “initial”, “middle” or “final” page of a deed are estimated, and then an optimal sequence of page labels is computed at the whole bundle level. Empirical results are reported which show that this approach achieves almost perfect segmentation of bundles of a massive Spanish series of historical notarial records.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
To avoid cumbersome equations, we will abuse the notation and index the elements of a sequence of sequences with a plain, rather than parenthesized superindex. That is, we will write \(D^k\), rather than \(D^{(k)}\).
- 3.
Following time-honored tradition in signal processing and automatic speech recognition, the term posteriorgram is used for this type of (variable-length) sequences of posterior probability vectors.
- 4.
In http://prhlt-carabela.prhlt.upv.es/carabela the images of this collection and a search interface based on Probabilistic Indexing are available.
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Acknowledgements
Work partially supported by the research grants: the SimancasSearch project as Grant PID2020-116813RB-I00a funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and ValgrAI - Valencian Graduate School and Research Network of Artificial Intelligence and the Generalitat Valenciana, co-funded by the European Union. The second author’s work was partially supported by the Universitat Politècnica de València under grant FPI-I/SP20190010. The third author’s work is supported by a María Zambrano grant from the Spanish Ministerio de Universidades and the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR.
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Prieto, J.R., Becerra, D., Toselli, A.H., Alonso, C., Vidal, E. (2023). Segmentation of Large Historical Manuscript Bundles into Multi-page Deeds. In: Pertusa, A., Gallego, A.J., Sánchez, J.A., Domingues, I. (eds) Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis. IbPRIA 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14062. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36616-1_10
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