A Fast CBIR System of Old Ornamental Letter

This paper deals with the CBIR of old printed graphics (of XVI◦ and XVII◦ centuries) like the headpieces, the pictures and the ornamental letters. These graphical parts are previously segmented from digitized old books in order to constitute image databases for the historians. Today, large databases exist and involves to use automatic retrieval tools able to process large amounts of data. For this purpose, we have developed a fast retrieval system based on a Run Length Encoding (RLE) of images. We use the RLE in an image comparison algorithm using two steps: one of image centering and then a distance computation. Our centering step allows to solve the shifting problems usually met between the segmented images. We present experiments and results about our system concerning the processing time and the retrieval precision.