anyAlign: An Intelligent and Interactive Text-Alignment Web-Application for Historical Document

Text alignment is an important step for analyzing historical archives. For analysis, it is important to align the text with their corresponding document images. It is a time and labor intensive work for many paleographers. In this paper, we have presented an end-to-end semi-automatic and interactive text alignment system for historical document. The presented system consists of five main sequential steps: binarization, automatic text-line extraction, interactive error correction in extracted text-line, automatic text alignment, and interactive error correction in aligned text. The anyOCR system [1] is used for the first three steps. Afterwards, text alignment is done automatically by the system using Oriented Fast and Rotated Brief (ORB) local image feature descriptors. The ORB features are matched by k-Nearest-Neighbor (KNN). Finally, the system provides an interactive user interface for rectifying wrong text alignment. The results are discussed in the evaluation section.

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