Historical document analysis: A review of French projects and open issues

This subject is on the crossroad of different fields like signal or image processing, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, man-machine interaction and knowledge engineering. Indeed, each of these different fields can contribute to build a reliable and efficient document interpretation system. This paper points out the necessities and importance of dedicated services oriented to historical documents. In a first step, a bird view approach is adopted describing document specificities and associated projects which deal with the enrichment and the exploitation of heritage documents. This synthesis lead to a set of particular Research Problems. The second part focuses on a set of open issues, which should be tackled by the document analysis community, for the management of the features and the knowledge representation of these ancient documents.