Cross-evaluation of graph-based keyword spotting in handwritten historical documents

Abstract

In contrast to statistical representations, graphs offer some inherent advantages when it comes to handwriting representation. That is, graphs are able to adapt their size and structure to the individual handwriting and represent binary relationships that might exist within the handwriting. We observe an increasing number of graph-based keyword spotting frameworks in the last years. In general, keyword spotting allows to retrieve instances of an arbitrary query in documents. It is common practice to optimise keyword spotting frameworks for each document individually, and thus, the overall generalisability remains somehow questionable. In this paper, we focus on this question by conducting a cross-evaluation experiment on four handwritten historical documents. We observe a direct relationship between parameter settings and the actual handwriting. We also propose different ensemble strategies that allow to keep up with individually optimised systems without a priori knowledge of a certain manuscript. Such a system can potentially be applied to new documents without prior optimisation.