Exploring Old Maps by Finger Tracing of Characters
Yuichi Watanabe, Kengo Terasawa, Yasuyuki Sumi · 2017
In this paper, we propose a system that supports its users to explore old maps by showing extracted areas having similar images with the character region traced by the user's fingers. Since Japanese old maps do not have a predetermined character orientation, characters of the various orientation are drawn. Tracing gives a clue to extract region and orientation of characters. The system cuts out connected components existing on the user's traced line as characters. We describe two usage scenarios for better reading historical maps: revealing historical background by highlighting specific keywords; and comparison of multiple maps clued by highly specific queries.