Dr. Basilis Gatos Basilis G. Gatos received his Electrical Engineering Diploma in 1992 and his Ph.D. degree in 1998, both from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Democritus University of Thrace, Xanthi, Greece. His Ph.D. thesis is on Optical Character Recognition Techniques. In 1993 he was awarded a scholarship from the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, NCSR "Demokritos", where he worked till 1996. From 1997 to 1998 he worked as a Software Engineer at Computer Logic S.A. From 1998 to 2001 he worked at Lambrakis Press Archives as a Director of the Research Division in the field of digital preservation of old newspapers. From 2001 to 2003 he worked at BSI S.A. as Managing Director of R&D Division in the field of document management and recognition. He is currently working as a Researcher at the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National Center for Scientific Research "Demokritos", Athens, Greece. His main research interests are in Image Processing and Document Image Analysis, OCR and Pattern Recognition. He has more than 140 publications in journals and international conference proceedings and has participated in several research programs funded by the European community. He is a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece, of the Editorial Board of the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR) and program committee member of several international Conferences and Workshops(e.g. ICDAR 2009, ICFHR 2010, ICDAR 2011, CBDAR 2011, AND 2011, International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing 2011, DAS 2012, ICDAR 2013). Basiis Gatos is co-organiser of the International Conference of Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR) in 2014.
After many years of scholar study, old Greek machine-printed and handwritten collections continue to be an important source of novel information for scholars, concerning both the history of earlier times as well as the development of cultural documentation over the centuries. Although the accurate recognition of Latin machine-printed text is now considered largely a solved problem, recognition of old Greek documents is still the subject of active research. In this presentation, we will focus on our recent achievements for the recognition of Early Christian Greek manuscripts and old Greek polytonic (multi accent) machine-printed documents. All these documents originate from St. Catherine’s Mount Sinai Monastery as well as from several Greek archives and libraries and contain a vast amount of valuable information. A robust indexing of these documents is essential for quick and efficient content exploitation of the valuable historical collections. The continuity in writing for characters of the same or consecutive words as well as the unique characteristics of the lower case script in Early Greek manuscripts guided us to develop a segmentation-free recognition technique as a fundamental assistance to old Greek handwritten manuscript OCR. Recognition of machine-printed document images having Greek polytonic characters is also a challenging task due the large number of existing character classes (more than 270). To this end, we have focused our research efforts towards an OCR engine for Greek polytonic documents that combines suitable pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction and classification modules in order to support and facilitate current and future efforts in old Greek document digitization and processing.