Keyframe-based video mosaicing for historical Ottoman documents

Image mosaicing is a trendy research area in computer vision in recent years. Instead of images, video frames can be mosaiced to form a larger aggregate. In both cases, merging computations generally depend on the common parts in consecutive images, which are called overlapping regions. The presence of mobile devices with a camera provides higher image and video acquisition; hence video mosaicing techniques can be utilized to digitize and to create high resolution historical document images for later use in browsing and retrieval systems. Here, we present a technique to create high resolution images of historical Ottoman documents from video. The video captures the frames while tracing the document in row major ordering. In the preprocessing steps, the frames are oriented automatically by the help of tracking the optical flow, and the keyframes are selected such that a sufficient overlapping region in between is guaranteed. Then the scanning phase traces these keyframes in horizontal and vertical manner to create the final video mosaic image in higher resolution. Both horizontal and vertical scan operations utilize a distance vector to compute similarity between two adjacent images. The effectiveness of the video mosaicing approach for historical Ottoman documents is evaluated, and the results of the experiments show that the approach is expressive yet effective to create high resolution Ottoman images.