Historical Map Toponym Extraction for Efficient Information Retrieval
Ladislav Lenc and
Jiří Martínek and
Josef Baloun and
Martin Prantl and
Pavel Král
15th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (2022)
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Abstract
The paper deals with detection, classification and recognition of toponyms in hand-drawn historical cadastral maps. Toponyms are local names of towns, villages and landscape features such as rivers, forests etc. The detected and recognized toponyms are utilized as keywords in an information retrieval system that allows intelligent and efficient searching in historical map collections. We create a novel annotated dataset that is freely available for research and educational purposes. Then, we propose a novel approach for toponym classification based on KAZE descriptor. Next we compare and evaluate several state-of-the-art methods for text and object detection on our toponym detection task. We further show the results of toponym text recognition using popular Tesseract engine.