Encoding hieroglyph segments to represent hieroglyphs following the bag of visual word model for retrieval

The representation of hieroglyphs in retrieval systems represents a great challenge since these systems’ results highly depend on the used representation. In the literature, the most successful works in this area compute local descriptors from a set of points of interest taken from the entire hieroglyph and use them under the BoVW model to represent hieroglyphs. Unlike these works, this paper presents a way to extract segments from hieroglyphs and, by encoding the extracted segments through local descriptors, proposes to use them under the Bag of Visual Words (BoVW) model to represent hieroglyphs. Our experiments show that the proposed representation allows us to obtain retrieval results that overcome those reported by using state of the art representations.