Computer assistance for digital libraries: contributions to middle-ages and authors' manuscripts exploitation and enrichment

In this paper, we are interested in digitized middle-ages and 18th century authors' manuscripts analysis for the realization of suitable assistance tools dedicated to humanists and historians. The purpose is to help them in their intuitive and empirical work of information retrieval (word retrieval, identification of writers, writing styles classification...) and to enrich ancient manuscripts with additional descriptions which are based on writing styles and shapes analysis. In this project, we intend to create efficient software that analyses images contents and automatically extracts necessary information for writing indexation. This work can be done by adapting our expertise in document image processing to the domain of middle-ages and authors' manuscript. The development of such dedicated solutions is a complex task which reaches today technological limits due to the difficulty to automatically process a growing mass of digitized images of handwriting documents from different origins