Digital Library Framework for Arabic Manuscripts

Handwritten Arabic manuscripts have been highly underutilized owing to the fact that, to our knowledge, there is no system or interface in existence, utilizing which user can browse or search the desired information. Given vast content of these manuscripts, it is important to develop indexing systems that support content-based retrieval from historical manuscripts. In this paper, we propose a "Digital library framework for Arabic Manuscripts". A prototype system has been implemented which supports preprocessing of document images. To enhance their quality, feature extraction of the user identified words for similarity matching purposes is carried out. Utilizing relevance feedback from the user, the system indexes the manuscript pages for later efficient retrieval. The prototype system has been tested and encouraging results were achieved.