Retrieval of the ornaments from the Hand-Press Period: an overview
 Etienne Baudrier
LSIIT (Illkirch, France)
baudrier@unistra.fr
Se´bastien Busson
CESR (Tours, France)
sebastien.busson@univ-tours.fr
Silvio Corsini
BCU (Lausanne, Switzerland)
silvio.corsini@bcu.unil.ch
Mathieu Delalandre
CVC (Barcelona, Spain)
mathieu@cvc.uab.es
Je´roˆme Landre´
CReSTIC (Troyes, France)
jerome.landre@univ-reims.fr
Fre´de´ric Morain-Nicolier
CReSTIC (Troyes, France)
frederic.nicolier@univ-reims.fr
Abstract
This paper deals with the topic of the retrieval of doc-
ument images focused on a specific application: the orna-
ments of the Hand-Press period. It presents an overview
as a result of the work and the discussions undertaken by
a workgroup on this subject. The paper starts by giving a
general view about digital libraries of ornaments and as-
sociated retrieval problematics. Two main issues are un-
derlined: content based image retrieval (CBIR) and image
difference visualization. Several contributions are summa-
rized, commented and compared. Conclusions and open
problems arising from this overview are twofold: 1. con-
tributions on CBIR miss scale-invariant methods and don’t
provide significative evaluation results. 2. robust registra-
tion is the open problem for visual comparison.
1 Introduction
This article deals with the topic of document image re-
trieval. During the last 25 years, many work has been done
on this topic dealing with the retrieval of official forms,
maps, drawings, correspondences, etc. We focus here on a
new application: the retrieval of ornaments from the Hand-
Press period (Figure 1). The Hand-Press period runs from
around 1454 (approximate date of Gutenburg’s invention) to
through the first half of the nineteenth century (when mech-
anized presses started to appear). The particularity of this
period is the use of block of wood, with a relief carving on
it, to print the ornaments.
With the growing of interest in the cultural heritage
preservation in the 2000s, a large work of digitization of his-
torical collections has been carried out. Nowadays several
databases of ornaments are available and continue to grow,
The authors’ names appear in the alphabetical order.
Figure 1. Some ornaments
name size type period
BVHz 8 000 * 16th
Fleuronx 6 500 * 17th
Mouriau{ 1 800 * 18th
Moˆria˚nek 1 500 * 18th
Impcat 1 300 trademark 16-18th
Table 1. Databases of ornaments
the Table 1 refers the most known. These ornaments are
extracted from the whole digitized pages, using full auto-
matic or user-driven segmentation methods [9], or recorded
independently.
Historians next employ thesaurus to index these images.
They first record the individual instances of ornament oc-
currence in order to identify the individual blocks. Next,
they use a subject-specific classification system, like Icon-
class1, to describe the identified blocks. This identification
is also very useful to date the books and to authenticate out-
puts from some printing-houses and authors [7]. Indeed
numerous editions, published in the past centuries, do not
reveal their true origin on the title pages. Fictive or mis-
leading addresses are legion. Historians rely then on the
yhttp://www.informatik.uni-augsburg.de/heron/
zhttp://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr
xhttp://dbserv1-bcu.unil.ch/ornements/scripts/
{http://www.ornements-typo-mouriau.be/
khttp://promethee.philo.ulg.ac.be/moriane/ornSearch.aspx
http://eclipsi.bib.ub.es/imp/impcat.htm
1http://www.iconclass.nl/
1