Florian Westphal recently participated in the Family History Technology Workshop (FHTW) in Provo, Utah, where he presented his work on preprocessing historical documents. While in Utah he also visited in the Rootstech conference in Salt Lake City and established connections at the Brigham Young University (BYU).
Efficient binarization for historical document analysis
At the Family History Technology Workshop (FHTW) in Provo, Utah Florian presented his work on efficient binarization of historical documents. The work is concerned with document readability, Howe’s binarization algorithm, and heterogenous computing and is a collaboration between BTH and Arkiv Digital. Arkiv digital provides access to almost 60 million images containing church books, court records, military records and more.
The paper containing Florians work in progress and the he presented were published on the web site of the FHTW
Brigham Young University
Thanks to Professor William Barrett (professor for computer graphics [2]) and Seth Stewart (graduate student in the computer graphics lab), Florian was also able to meet several other students and faculty members at Brigham Young University (BYU) including Dr. Ryan Farrell, Dr. Christophe Giraud-Carrier, Prof. Kevin Seppi and Prof. Tony Martinez.
Apart from faculty members Florian also had time to meet students working in the computer graphics lab, the machine learning lab, and the family history lab.
The purpose of the visit was to discuss common grounds and advertise collaboration possibilities within the BigData profile.
The universities will keep in touch and hopefully establish a sustainable collaboration in the future.
[1] – http://fhtw.byu.edu/program [2] – https://cs.byu.edu/faculty/barrett
The picture shows from left to right: Bridget Stewart, Seth Stewart, Florian Westphal, and Professor Barrett. It was taken in front of the Provo temple of the LDS church
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