Keyword spotting for cursive document retrieval

We present one of the first attempts towards automatic retrieval of documents, in the noisy environment of unconstrained, multiple author, handwritten forms. The documents were written in cursive script for which conventional OCR and text retrieval engines are not adequate. We focus on a visual word spotting indexing scheme for scanned documents housed in the Archives of the Indies in Seville, Spain. The framework presented utilizes pattern recognition, learning and information fusion methods, and is motivated from human word-spotting studies. The proposed system is described and initial results are presented.