Ornamental Letters Image Classification Using Local Dissimilarity Maps

This article describes a new method for ancient books ornamental letters segmentation and recognition. The pur-pose of our work is to automatically determine the letterrepresented in an ornamental letter image. Our process isdivided in two parts: a segmentation step of the ornamentalletter is followed by a recognition step. The segmentationprocess uses multiresolution analysis to filter backgrounddecorations followed by a binarisation step and a morpho-logic reconstruction of the expected letter. The recogni-tion process use the previously obtained reconstruction andcompares it with capital letters images used as a dictionaryof shapes with the Local Dissimilarity Map (LDM) distance.