| Abstract |
The preservation and study of historical records and of cultural inheritance are of utmost importance, not only to the experts, but also to the society. In particular, historical documents constitute indisputable historical evidence, and are therefore an integral part of societal and/or ethnic groups. The most known approach in document preservation has been - and remains to be - their safekeeping and usage in the premises of a library. However, there are several drawbacks in it; the documents age, the need for access by a large number of researchers(many times simultaneously), and the need of physical presence at the library in order to study the documents, are some of the problems that make this approach ineffective, and in many cases difficult, or even impossible, to impement. For these reasons, and considering the current trend for electronic access to information, we witness in recent years agradual turn towards the adoption and usage of digital libraries for providing access to historical documents. Such an approach effectively addresses the problem of document preservation and also provides for integrating with the documents additional information (such as summary, comments, translation) which offers added value to the existing material. In line with the above, the development of a digital library is pursued within the ΑΡΗΟΝ project; the requirements for the design and subsequent development of all relevant subsystems have been set to meet the spwcial needs of the Vikelaia Municipality Library of Heraklion. ARHON is aiming at the preservation and the best possible usage of archival material that exists in Vikelaia Municipality Library in the form of documents. The ARHON system consists of three subsystems: - image management subsystem - data base subsystem communication and interconnection subsystem In this work we have addressed the development of the first subsystem of ARHON, i.e. the image mamagement subsystem. More specifically, we have studied, developed and tested all modules that are needed for document acquisition(as images) and storage in electronic form, and the subsequent management and usage of the document images(visualization, image manipulation and related services). To that end, we have developed image digitation procedures that are adapted to the documents at hand. Special emphasis has been given in the design of the image processing algorithms in order to preserve all useful information in the document images. An extensive comparisson of existing compression methods has also been performed, in order to select and adopt the most appropriate for our purposes. Finally a user interface has been developed, acting as a link between the image retrieval subsystem and the image display module. The result of this work is a complete image management susystem that, together with the other subsystems, consist an integrated multimedia archival system. The image management subsystem has alraedy been extensively tested in realistic conditions and the result are very encouraging.
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Διαχείριση Εικόνων Εγγράφων σε Πολυμεσικά Αρχειακά Συστήματα
