HistoSketch: A Semi-Automatic Annotation Tool for Archival Documents

This article describes a sketch-based framework for semi-automatic annotation of historical document collections. It is motivated by the fact that fully automatic methods, while helpful for extracting metadata from large collections, have two main drawbacks in a real-world application: (i) they are error-prone and (ii) they only capture a subset of all the knowledge in the document base, both meaning that manual intervention is always required. Therefore, we have developed a practical framework for allowing experts to extract knowledge from document collections in a sketch-based scenario. The main possibilities of the proposed framework are: (a) browsing the collection efficiently, (b) providing gestures for metadata input, (c) supporting handwritten notes and (d) providing gestures for launching automatic extraction processes such as OCR or word spotting.