A Document Image Retrieval System

In this paper, a system is presented that locates words in document image archives. This technique performs the word matching directly in the document images bypassing character recognition and using word images as queries. First, it makes use of document image processing techniques, in order to extract powerful features for the description of the word images. The features used for the comparison are capable of capturing the general shape of the query, and escape details due to noise or different fonts. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our system, we used a collection of noisy documents and we compared our results with those of a commercial optical character recognition (OCR) package.