GRAPHEM (Grapheme based Retrieval and Analysis for PalaeograpHic Expertise of medieval Manuscripts)

The research program GRAPHEM (Grapheme based Retrieval and Analysis for PalaeograpHic Expertise of medieval Manuscripts) federates five research teams: 3 laboratories in computer science (LIRIS, LIFO, and LIPADE) and 2 in human sciences (Institut de recherche et d'histoire des Textes and Ecole nationale des chartes). Its aim is to improve the data mining and image processing techniques applied to medieval scripts and their classification.

Partners
The project was funded by the French Research Agency (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) for the period Jan. 2008 - Jul. 2011, and lead by the LIRIS (UMR 5205, Laboratoire d'InfoRmatique en Image et Systèmes d'information). The involved partners are:
 * LIFO (EA 4022, Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale d'Orléans)
 * LIPADE (Laboratoire d'Informatique Paris Descartes, former CRIP5)
 * Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes, CNRS
 * Ecole Nationale des Chartes

Corpus
The photographic material used during the project is the documentation gathered for the Catalogues des manuscrits datés in France, comprising a collection of 9000 digital images of dated or datable medieval book scripts from the 9th to the 16th c.

Results
The major achievements are:
 * 4 different content based image retrieving systems, working on 9000 images
 * 1 comparison tool (to compare the results of the different systems)
 * 1 measurement tool for palaeographers Graphoskop
 * 1 result visualization system