Handwritten Text Recognition for Historical Documents

The amount of digitized legacy documents has been rising dramatically over the last years due mainly to the increasing number of on-line digital libraries publishing this kind of documents. The vast majority of them remain waiting to be transcribed into a textual electronic format (such as ASCII or PDF) that would provide historians and other researchers new ways of indexing, consulting and querying them. In this work, the state-of-the-art Handwritten Text Recognition techniques are applied for the automatic transcription of these historical documents. We report results for several ancient documents.