Historical manuscript dating using image analysis techniques

Abstract

Dating historical manuscripts is a challenging task for historians and paleographers that requires specialized knowledge of scripts and writing styles, writing instruments and types of papers etc. During the last two decades, there has been an increased tendency to digitize the historical manuscripts not only to preserve them but to also allow digital access and computerized processing of these documents. This research aims to explore the application of image analysis and machine learning techniques to automatically date the historical manuscripts. Development of such dating systems are likely to facilitate the paleographers in analysis of huge collections of handwritten documents.