Retrieval of images from a library of watermarks for ancient paper identification
Christian Rauber, Thierry Pun, Peter F. Tschudin · 1997
Introduction The importance of electronic publishing, storage and distribution of documents is increasing and will have profound implications for our economy, culture and society. The multimedia digitalisation of libraries and the distribution of the contents of museums is revolutionising these organisations and will make these resources available to a much wider audience than was previously possible. The main goal of our project is to develop a system for the archival, retrieval, and distribution of electronic documents [1]. Information is accessed via the World Wide Web with a search mechanism that allows the retrieval of text and images according to their content [2]. This system was applied to an existing library. The internationally known Swiss Paper Museum in Basel houses thousands of images of historical papers as well as ancient watermarks [3]. The difficulty for historians is to determine the origin and date of creation of an unknown paper. For this purpose, an efficie