Transcription of Historical Encrypted Manuscripts : Evaluation of an automatic interactive transcription tool.

Abstract: Countless of historical sources are saved in national libraries and archives all over the world and contain important information about our history. Some of these sources are encrypted to prevent people from reading it. This thesis examines a semi-automated Interactive transcription Tool based on unsupervised learning without any labelled training data that has been developed for transcription of encrypted sources and compares it to manual transcription. The interactive transcription tool is based on handwritten text recognition techniques and the system identifies cluster of symbols based on similarity measures. The tool is evaluated on ciphers with number sequences that have previously been transcribed manually to compare how well the transcription tool performs. The weaknesses of the tool are described and suggestions on how the tool can be improved are proposed. Transcription based on HTR techniques and clustering shows promising results and the unsupervised method based on clustering should be further investigated on ciphers with various symbol sets.