Keyword spotting in historical handwritten documents based on graph matching

• Published in: Pattern recognition 2018-09, Vol.81, p.240-253
• Main Authors: Stauffer, Michael, Fischer, Andreas, Riesen, Kaspar
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bipartite graph matching; Ensemble methods; Graph representation; Handwritten keyword spotting
• ISSN: 0031-3203; 1873-5142
• DOI: 10.1016/j.patcog.2018.04.001

•We present a novel Keyword Spotting (KWS) solution to improve the accessibility to digitalised historical handwritten documents with respect to browsing and searching.•We introduce four novel graph representations to describe the topological characteristics of handwritten words.•Our graph-based KWS approach can keep up or outperform several state-of-the-art template-based as well as learning-based matching approaches on four benchmark datasets. [Display omitted] In the last decades historical handwritten documents have become increasingly available in digital form. Yet, the accessibility to these documents with respect to browsing and searching remained limited as full automatic transcription is often not possible or not sufficiently accurate. This paper proposes a novel reliable approach for template-based keyword spotting in historical handwritten documents. In particular, our framework makes use of different graph representations for segmented word images and a sophisticated matching procedure. Moreover, we extend our method to a spotting ensemble. In an exhaustive experimental evaluation on four widely used benchmark datasets we show that the proposed approach is able to keep up or even outperform several state-of-the-art methods for template- and learning-based keyword spotting.