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Project Proposal: An Historical Manuscript Analysis System

Supervisor: Alan Sexton

Keywords: Final Year Undergraduate Students Only, Document Image Analysis, User Interface Design

Brief Description:

Archaeologists and Historians, in their studies of ancient languages, manuscripts and writing, often need to do very difficult and painstaking character recognition of symbols and text. Recently some illuminated manuscripts from the 11th and 12th century have been scanned at very high resolution (c.f. http://www.isos.dcu.ie/) and are available for inspection and processing. While the languages of these manuscripts may not be known to the students (indeed, in some cases the interest is to decipher lost languages), computer techniques to match images, extract common symbols and cluster patterns of images, together with various image enhancement techniques, could prove very useful.

I have obtained a large collect of images of manuscripts of the the Pilgrims Progress. There is significant scientific interest in determining information about the scribes who wrote them. I believe that image analysis techniques should be able to find objective evidence supporting or contradicting commonly held beliefs about the origin and development of these documents

This project is to develop a collection of tools in a software toolbox useful for such purposes. It will involve development of specialist noise reduction, deskewing, binarisation, glyph extraction, shape clustering and identification algorithms.

Special Equipment: No special equipment requirements

Special Software: No special software requirements



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