Extraction of Ancient Map Contents Using Trees of Connected Components

Ancient maps are an historical and cultural heritage widely recognized as a very important source of information, especially for dialectological researches, the cartographical heritage produces first-rate data. However, exploiting such maps is a quite difficult task to achieve, and we are focusing our attention on this major issue. In this paper, we consider the Linguistic Atlas of France (ALF), built between 1902 and 1910 and we propose an original approach using tree of connected components for the separation of the content in layers for facilitating the extraction, the analysis, the viewing and the diffusion of the data contained in these ancient linguistic atlases.