Text/graphic labelling of ancient printed documents

This paper presents a text/graphic labelling for ancient printed documents. Our approach is based on the extraction and the quantification of the various orientations that are present in ancient printed document images. The documents are initially cut into normalized square windows in which we analyze significant orientations with a directional rose. Each kind of information (textual or graphical) is typically identified and marked by its orientation distribution. This choice of characterization allows us to separate textual regions from graphics by minimizing the a priori knowledge. The evaluation of our proposition lies on a page classification using layout extraction criteria. The system has been tested over several ancient printed books of the Renaissance.