Recent advances in Handwritten Text Recognition and Document Layout Analysis make it possible to extract information from digitized documents and make them accessible beyond the archive shelves. But the reading order of the elements in those documents still is an open problem that has to be solved in order to provide that information with the correct structure. Most of the studies on the reading order task are rule-base approaches that focus on printed documents, while less attention has been paid to handwritten text documents. In this work we propose a new approach to automatically determine the reading order of text lines in handwritten text documents. The task is approached as a sorting problem where the order-relation operator is learned directly from examples. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on three different datasets.

Content-based classification of manuscripts is an important task that is generally performed in archives and libraries by experts with a wealth of knowledge on the manuscripts contents. Unfortunately, many manuscript collections are so vast that it is not feasible to rely solely on experts to perform this task. Current approaches for textual-content-based manuscript classification generally require the handwritten images to be first transcribed into text -- but achieving sufficiently accurate transcripts is generally unfeasible for large sets of historical manuscripts. We propose a new approach to automatically perform this classification task which does not rely on any explicit image transcripts. It is based on ``probabilistic indexing'', a relatively novel technology which allows to effectively represent the intrinsic word-level uncertainty generally exhibited by handwritten text images. We assess the performance of this approach on a large collection of complex manuscripts from the Spanish Archivo General de Indias, with promising results.

Traditional approaches for the recognition or identification of the writer of a handwritten text image used to relay on heuristic knowledge about the shape and other features of the strokes of previously segmented characters. However, recent works have done significantly advances on the state of the art thanks to the use of various types of deep neural networks. In most of all of these works, text images are decomposed into patches, which are processed by the networks without any previous character or word segmentation. In this paper, we study how the way images are decomposed into patches impact recognition accuracy, using three publicly available datasets. The study also includes a simpler architecture where no patches are used at all - a single deep neural network inputs a whole text image and directly provides a writer recognition hypothesis. Results show that bigger patches generally lead to improved accuracy, achieving in one of the datasets a significant improvement over the best results reported so far.