Project acronym: <\/strong>IMPACT<\/p>\n\n\n\n Background Project acronym: IMPACT Although millions of books are scanned and put online every year, making old documents and texts available on the web is a difficult and painstaking process. Project IMPACT \u2013 which stands for Improving Access to Text – is focused on the making the process easier. Project IMPACT director Hildelies Balk explained: \u201cThe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"template":"","geographic_location":[96],"collaboration_opportunities":[100],"technologies":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
Although millions of books are scanned and put online every year, making old documents and texts available on the web is a difficult and painstaking process.<\/strong>
Project IMPACT \u2013 which stands for Improving Access to Text – is focused on the making the process easier.
Project IMPACT director Hildelies Balk explained: \u201cThe problem with turning an historic document into a machine readable text is that it is so very old, everything is different from a modern document, it has old fonts, old words and a very difficult layout.\u201c
Once scanned they are left full of errors, because computers struggle to read old texts with strange layouts, fonts and spellings.
Clemens Neudecker, technical manager for European projects at Koninklijke Bibliotheek, showed us one example: \u201cThis is the Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton. You see actually what we call shine through, that is ink from the opposite page which is just shining through the paper, you see that the paper is warped, and you can also see here there is this long \u2018s\u2019 also in use, which can very easily be confused with an \u2018f\u2019.\u201d
Researchers at the National Library of the Netherlands have spent four years in a European project to improve software tools to read old books.
Researcher Hildelies Balk said: \u201cWe improved software for image enhancement, optical character recognition, post-correction of the document and language technology to make it more accessible.\u201c
That know-how has already been integrated into the market-leader digitisation software \u2013 and the results are much improved.
Clemens Neudecker talked us through one project: \u201cHere we have an example of the image being straightened. And the next thing is that these borders also need to be cropped. The next step is to transform that into a black and white image in order to enhance the contrast background and foreground.
\u201cAt the very end of the process the user gets the recognised full text, and there\u2019s also the structural features of this text – for example paragraphs, headlines and the like are also detected.\u201c
The project claims at least a 15 percent improvement in the accuracy of scanned text.
It means precious archives should be much more available.
Hildelies Balk concluded: \u201cText that is not fully digital, it is virtually invisible. Everyone is used to going into a search engine, and looking for a word, and if they don\u2019t find this it basically isn\u2019t there for them.\u201d
This innovation was made possible by Israel\u2019s continued participation in the official Horizon 2020 fund, managed in Israel by ISERD part of The Israel Innovation Authority (Formerly the Office of the Chief Scientist and MATIMOP). The initiative has taken Israeli R&D to the next level with the help of ground-breaking collaboration between scientists in Israel and Europe, as well as essential funding and support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Project details<\/strong>
Project acronym: <\/strong>IMPACT
Participants:<\/strong> Netherlands (Coordinator), Poland, UK, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Israel, Germany
FP7 Project N\u00b0<\/strong> 215064
Total costs:<\/strong> \u20ac15 503 509
EU contribution:<\/strong> \u20ac11 500 000
Duration:<\/strong> January 2008 – June 2012<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"