Visual Investigation of Ancient Documents

We present a work in progress about extracting words from images of historical printed documents by using fast marching method. Segmentation is a process that allows an image to be divided into disjoint zones, so that extracted areas contain homogeneous characteristics. The numerical method, we used to segment images, is based on the theory of interface evolution, described by the eikonal equation. We adopted the fast marching technique to solve the upwind finite difference approximation of the eikonal equation. Segmentation of ancient documents is generally acknowledged as a very complicated problem because this kind of documents can be low quality, presenting local skew and several degradations due to old printing or ink stains.