A Web Application for Watermark Recognition

Abstract

The study of watermarks is a key step for archivists and historians as it enables them to reveal the origin of paper. Although highly practical, automatic watermark recognition comes with many difficulties and is still considered an unsolved challenge. Nonetheless, Shen et al. [2019] recently introduced a new approach for this specific task which showed promising results. Building upon this approach, this work proposes a new public web application dedicated to automatic watermark recognition entitled Filigranes pour tous. The application not only hosts a detailed catalog of more than 17k watermarks manually collected from the French National Archives (Minutier central) or extracted from existing online resources (Briquet database), but it also enables non-specialists to identify a watermark from a simple photograph in a few seconds. Moreover, additional watermarks can easily be added by the users making the enrichment of the existing catalog possible through crowdsourcing. Our Web application is available at https://filigranes.inria.fr/.