Capstone: Gather Valuable Information Found on Headstones as an Automated Process

Cemetery headstones contain historical and genealogical information that is largely untapped and is difficult to access. We introduce a solution through computer vision and OCR that allows the user to take a photo of a headstone with a GPS smart phone, review and correct, if necessary, the regions recognized as text, and have the text, images, and GPS location from the headstone extracted, recorded, and uploaded in digital form. A graphical link is then made to a cemetery map for browsing, searching and making the information accessible on the web. A segmentation of text is done through interactive graph cuts, as described in [1]. After image filtering and text rectification, the image of the text is then passed to an OCR engine for text recognition.