Semiautomatic recognition and georeferencing of places in early maps
Winfried Höhn, Hans-Günter Schmidt, Hendrik Schöneberg · 2013
Early maps are a valuable resource for historical research, this is why digital libraries for early maps become a necessary tool for research support in the age of information. In this article we introduce the Referencing and Annotation Tool (RAT), designed to extract information about all places displayed in a map and link them to a place on a modern map. RAT automatically recognizes place markers in an early map according to a template specified by the user and estimates the position of the annotated place in the modern map, thus making georeferencing easier. After a brief summary on related projects, we describe the functionality of the system. We discuss the most important implementation details and factors influencing recognition accuracy and performance. The advantages of our semiautomatic approach are high accuracy and a significant decrease of the user's cognitive load.