Decipherment of Historical Manuscript Images

European libraries and archives are filled with enciphered manuscripts from the early modern period. These include military and diplomatic correspondence, records of secret societies, private letters, and so on. Although they are enciphered with classical cryptographic algorithms, their contents are...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inarXiv.org
Main Authors Yin, Xusen, Aldarrab, Nada, Megyesi, Beáta, Knight, Kevin
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 02.06.2019
Subjects
Algorithms
Archives & records
Clustering
Cryptography
Diplomatic facilities
Encryption
Historians
Image segmentation
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:European libraries and archives are filled with enciphered manuscripts from the early modern period. These include military and diplomatic correspondence, records of secret societies, private letters, and so on. Although they are enciphered with classical cryptographic algorithms, their contents are unavailable to working historians. We therefore attack the problem of automatically converting cipher manuscript images into plaintext. We develop unsupervised models for character segmentation, character-image clustering, and decipherment of cluster sequences. We experiment with both pipelined and joint models, and we give empirical results for multiple ciphers.
ISSN:2331-8422