PRAAD: Preprocessing and Analysis Tool for Arabic Ancient Documents

This paper presents the new system PRAAD for pre- processing and analysis of Arabic Historical Documents. It is composed of two important parts: Pre-processing and analysis of ancient documents. After digitization, the color or greyscale ancient documents images are distorted by the presence of strong background artefacts such as scan optical blur and noise, show-through and bleed-through effects and spots. In order to preserve and exploit this cultural heritage documents, we intend to create efficient tool that achieves restoration, binarisation, and analyses the document layout. The developed tool is done by adapting our expertise in document image processing of Arabic Ancient documents, printed or manuscripts. The different functions of PRAAD system are tested on a set of Arabic Ancient documents from the National library and the National Archives of Tunisia.