An old greek handwritten OCR system based on an efficient segmentation-free approach

Recognition of Old Greek Early Christian manuscripts is essential for efficient content exploitation of the valuable Old Greek Early Christian historical collections. In this paper, we focus on the problem of recognizing Old Greek manuscripts and propose a novel recognition technique that has been tested in a large number of important historical manuscript collections which are written in lowercase letters and originate from St. Catherine’s Mount Sinai Monastery. Based on an open and closed cavity character representation, we propose a novel, segmentation-free, fast and efficient technique for the detection and recognition of characters and character ligatures. First, we detect open and closed cavities that exist in the skeletonized character body. Then, the classification of a specific character or character ligature is based on the protrusible segments that appear in the topological description of the character skeletons. Experimental results prove the efficiency of the proposed approach.