DocExplore: Overcoming Cultural and Physical Barriers to Access Ancient Documents

Pierrick Tranouez (1) , Nicolas Stéphane (1) , Dovgalecs Vladislavs (1) , Burnett Alexandre (1) , Heutte Laurent (1) , Liang Yiqing (2) , Guest Richard (2) , Fairhurst Michael (2)

1 DocApp - LITIS - Equipe Apprentissage
2 School of Engineering and Digital Arts

In this paper, we describe DocExplore, an integrated software suite centered on the handling of digitized documents with an emphasis on ancient manuscripts. This software suite allows the augmentation and exploration of ancient documents of cultural interest. Specialists can add textual and multimedia data and metadata to digitized documents through a graphical interface that does not require technical knowledge. They are helped in this endeavor by sophisticated document analysis tools that allows for instance to spot words or patterns in images of documents. The suite is intended to ease considerably the process of bringing locked away historical materials to the attention of the general public by covering all the steps from managing a digital collection to creating interactive presentations suited for cultural exhibitions. Its genesis and sustained development reside in a collaboration of archivists, historians and computer scientists, the latter being not only in charge of the development of the software, but also of creating and incorporating novel pattern recognition for document analysis techniques.

Mots clés: cultural heritage; historical documents; manuscripts; document image analysis; document indexing; word spotting; authoring system; virtual book

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Traitement du texte et du document; Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]; Héritage culturel et muséologie

Pierrick Tranouez, Nicolas Stéphane, Dovgalecs Vladislavs, Burnett Alexandre, Heutte Laurent, et al.. DocExplore: Overcoming Cultural and Physical Barriers to Access Ancient Documents. ACM Document Engineering, Sep 2012, France. pp.NA. ⟨hal-00730420⟩