Towards an omnilingual word retrieval system for ancient manuscripts

In this article, we introduce the first method that allows the indexation of ancient manuscripts of any language and alphabet. We describe a word retrieval engine inspired by recent word-spotting advances on ancient manuscripts. Our approach does not need any layout segmentation and makes use of features fitted to any type of alphabet (Latin, Arabic, Chinese, etc.) and writing. The engine is tested on numerous documents and in several use-cases.