Overview

The talk will cover the background issues, challenges and opportunities in image processing and analysis of historical documents in the context of large-scale digitisation initiatives. The talk starts by examining the different factors that influence technical decisions in document digitisation. The types of documents typically encountered are discussed next with the challenges and possibilities they offer for digitisation and full-text conversion. Focussing on the needs and expectations of major libraries, the different stages in full-text conversion (image acquisition, enhancement, segmentation, OCR and post-processing) are examined along with the corresponding challenges and possibilities for improvement. Major past and current initiatives are also mentioned for the processing, analysis and recognition of historical documents.

About the speaker

Apostolos Antonacopoulos is currently the 1st Vice-President of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) and heads the Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (PRImA) research laboratory in the School of Computing, Science and Engineering at the University of Salford. He received his PhD from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) in 1995. Dr Antonacopoulos has worked and published extensively on various problems in Document Image Analysis and in Pattern Recognition and applications. For his outstanding service in the field and his innovative research on the analysis of historical documents, he received the IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award in 2005.

He is a member of the Editorial Boards of the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR), and of the Electronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis (ELCVIA) journal. He has served as Chair of the IAPR Conferences and Meetings Committee, Vice-Chair of the IAPR Technical Committee on Reading Systems (TC11), Chair of the IAPR Education Committee, Advisory Board member of ICDAR. He is General Chair of ACM DocEng2010, Co-Chair (Publicity) of ICFHR2010 and has served as Program Co-Chair or ICDAR2009, Chair (Publications) of ICDAR2003, Chair (Tutorials and Demos) ICFHR2008, Co-Chair of WDA2001 and WDA2003, and as Program Committee member of most current and recent editions of conferences in his field of research: ICPR, ICDAR, DAS, ACM DocEng, SPIE DRR, etc.

He has significant experience in leading and participating in national, European (FP7 and earlier) and industry-sponsored projects. Current project involvement includes the €12M IMPACT EU-funded project (analysis and recognition of scanned historical books and newspapers), and a £170K collaboration with industry on CCTV surveillance.