Semi-automatic Annotation Tool for Medieval Manuscripts

Abstract

Medieval manuscript layouts are quite complex. They contain textual elements such as insertions, annotations, and corrections. They may be richly decorated with ornaments, illustrations, and decorative initials making their layout even more complex. In this paper we describe a semi-automatic tool which annotates medieval manuscripts using our generic format. This format allows to represent the physical structure of such manuscripts. Our semi-automatic tool is composed of two parts. The first part achieves a layout analysis which automatically segments manuscripts into text blocks and text lines. That is, a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) identifies layout elements by using color features, it extracts the textual content image of the manuscript. Then, a segmentation based on Connected Component (CC) is performed on the textual content in order to retrieve text blocks and lines. The second part provides an interactive interface allowing the user to customize the automatic analysis, to visualize its results, and to correct them. Our tool is still a prototype, nevertheless, first experiments give encouraging results. Thus, in this paper, we show how to generate a ground truth for medieval manuscripts layouts.