Computer Science | Grinnell College

On Thursday, November 20, Toby Baratta 2017, Bo Wang 2016, and Kitt Nika 2016 will present their summer research on the automatic detection of place names on historical maps:

This past summer we did research on toponym detection and recognition on historical maps. Overall, our research goal was making historical maps more search-friendly and making information in the maps more accessible. Kitt Nika and Shen Zhang worked on detecting text strings on map images with maximally stable extremal regions (MSER). With this, they implemented a binarization method for future research in text detection. Kitt will discuss MSERs and the methods involving them in regards to text detection. Toby Baratta and Bo Wang worked on linking geographic datasets and recognizing toponyms from the detected text strings. With the alignment between historical maps and real-life geography, we used a Bayesian model to calculate probabilities of possible toponyms. Toby and Bo will discuss their work on increasing the range of our recognition system by adding area features such as lakes.

At 4:15 p.m., refreshments will be served in the Computer Science Commons. The talk, “Historical map processing: text detectors, database linking, and region models,” will begin at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

This Friday at CS Table, Kim and Josh will be leading a discussion about Mapping Trends in Health Care. The readings are available at the following link: http://foswiki.cs.grinnell.edu/foswiki/bin/view/Courses/HealthCareAndCom... We'll meet at noon in JRC 224A. Please feel free to e-mail [raymondw] if you have any questions!