Strip shredded document reconstruction using optical character recognition

Document reconstruction affects different areas such as archeology, philology and forensics. A reconstruction of fragmented writing materials allows to retrieve and to analyze the lost content. Due to the complexity of reconstruction, automated algorithms are necessary. A reconstruction methodology for shredded documents is presented in this paper which recognizes characters at the stripes' borders and matches them subsequently. In order to achieve this, an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system is exploited, that is capable of recognizing partially visible characters by means of local features. Thus, no binarization needs to be performed. Preliminary results show the ability of matching shredded documents using the information of cut characters.