Image Mining of Historical Manuscripts to Establish Provenance

he recent digitization of more than twenty million books has been led by initiatives from countries wishing to preserve their cultural heritage and by commercial endeavors, such as the Google Print Library Project. Within a few years a significant fraction of the world’s books will be online. For millions of intact books and tens of millions of loose pages, the provenance of the manuscripts may be in doubt or completely unknown, thus denying historians an understanding of the context of the content. In some cases it may be possible for human experts to regain the provenance by examining linguistic, cultural and/or stylistic clues. However, such experts are rare and this investigation is clearly a time-consuming process. 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...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: SDM
• Authors: Bing Hu, Thanawin Rakthanmanon, Bilson J. L. Campana, Abdullah Mueen, Eamonn J. Keogh
• Keywords: Data Mining, Force Implementation, Google Print, Image Similarity, SDM 2012