H-DocPro: a document image processing platform for historical documents

In this paper, we introduce the H-DocPro platform which is a publicly available document image processing platform for historical documents. H-DocPro is a result of our recent and ongoing research on historical document image processing and has been developed in order to monitor the successive application of several new or state-of-the-art document image processing methods. It is an open architecture software platform that permits several document image processing modules and methods (e.g. binarization, image enhancement, page split) to be utilized in an easy to define processing workflow. We provide detailed information on how to use H-DocPro, the available modules and methods as well as the way one can add his own components exploiting the open architecture form of the platform. Representative examples and experimental results using large sets of historical document images demonstrate the efficiency of H-DocPro methods.