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Establishing the provenance of historical manuscripts with a novel distance measure

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Abstract

The recent digitization of more than 20 million books has been led by initiatives from countries wishing to preserve their cultural heritage and by several commercial endeavors, including the Google Print Library Project. It is expected that within a few years a significant fraction of the world’s books will be online. However, for millions of complete books and tens of millions of loose pages, the provenance of the manuscripts may be completely unknown or disputed, thus denying historians an understanding of the context in which the content was created. In a handful of cases, it may be possible for experts to regain the provenance by examining linguistic, cultural and/or stylistic clues. However, such experts are a rarity and these investigations are time-consuming and expensive. One technique used by experts to establish provenance is the examination of the ornate initial letters appearing in the questioned manuscript. By comparing the initial letters in the manuscript to annotated initial letters whose origin is known, the provenance can be determined. In this work, we show for the first time that we can reproduce this ability with a computer algorithm. We use a recently introduced technique to measure texture similarity and show that it can recognize initial letters with an accuracy that rivals or exceeds human performance. A brute force implementation of this measure would require several months to process a single large book; however, we introduce a novel lower bound that allows us to process the books in hours or minutes.

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Notes

  1. We defer a detailed discussion of our experimental philosophy until Sect. 5; however, we briefly note that all our experiments are reproducible, and all code and data are available at [11].

  2. Just the unique initial letters were deleted.

  3. SIFT was faster by about 30% when given unlimited main memory. If we force it to use a smaller memory footprint, it becomes significantly slower [36].

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Acknowledgments

We thank all the digital archivists who produced the vast amounts of data that made this work possible, especially the NaviDoMass group who did exceptional work preparing and annotating the data. This work was funded by NSF awards 0803410 and 0808770. We also thank the reviewers for their useful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Riverside, USA

    Bing Hu, Thanawin Rakthanmanon, Bilson J. L. Campana, Abdullah Mueen & Eamonn Keogh

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  1. Bing Hu
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  2. Thanawin Rakthanmanon
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  3. Bilson J. L. Campana
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  4. Abdullah Mueen
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  5. Eamonn Keogh
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Correspondence to Bing Hu.

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Hu, B., Rakthanmanon, T., Campana, B.J.L. et al. Establishing the provenance of historical manuscripts with a novel distance measure. Pattern Anal Applic 18, 313–331 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10044-013-0332-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10044-013-0332-z

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