Recognition of old Greek manuscripts is essential for quick and efficient content exploitation of the valuable old Greek historical collections. In this paper, we focus on the problem of recognizing early Christian Greek manuscripts written in lower case letters. Based on the existence of hole regions in the majority of characters and character ligatures in these scripts, we propose a novel, segmentation-free, fast and efficient technique that assists the recognition procedure by tracing and recognizing the most frequently appearing characters or character ligatures. First, we detect hole regions that exist in the character body. Then, the protrusions in the outer contour outline of the connected components that contain the character hole regions are used for the classification of the area around holes to a specific character or a character ligature. The proposed method gives highly accurate results and offers great assistance to old Greek handwritten manuscript OCR.
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