Categorizing ancient documents

The analysis of historical documents is still a topical issue given the importance of information that can be extracted and also the importance given by the institutions to preserve their heritage. The main idea in order to characterize the content of the images of ancient documents after attempting to clean the image is segmented blocks texts from the same image and tries to find similar blocks in either the same image or the entire image database. Most approaches of offline handwriting recognition proceed by segmenting words into smaller pieces (usually characters) which are recognized separately. Recognition of a word then requires the recognition of all characters (OCR) that compose it. Our work focuses mainly on the characterization of classes in images of old documents. We use Som toolbox for finding classes in documents. We applied also fractal dimensions and points of interest to categorize and match ancient documents.