One very valuable cultural relics that are found in Southeast Asia is the collection of palm leaf manuscripts (Fig. 1 & 2). The literary works were mostly recorded on dried and treated palm leaves. Palm leaf manuscripts store various forms of knowledge and historical record of the social life of Southeast Asian cultures long ago. In Bali, palm leaf manuscripts were written in the ancient literary texts composed in the old Javanese language of Kawi and Sanskrit. In Cambodia, the languages written on the palm leaf documents vary from Khmer (the official language Cambodian people speak nowadays with slightly different spelling vocabularies) to Pali and Sanskrit by which the modern Khmer language is considerably influenced.
Figure 1. Balinese palm leaf manuscripts from Indonesia
Figure 2. Khmer palm leaf manuscripts from Cambodia
The palm leaf manuscripts contain discoloured parts and artefacts due to aging and low intensity variations or poor contrast, random noises, and fading. Several deformations in the character shapes are visible due to the merges and fractures of the use of nonstandard fonts, varying space between letters, and varying space between lines (Fig. 3 & 4). The process of digitizing and indexing palm leaf manuscripts are important. Researches on analysis of palm leaf manuscript images try to bring added value to digitized palm leaf manuscripts by developing tools to analyse, index and access quickly and efficiently to the content of manuscript and to make palm leaf manuscript more accessible, readable and understandable to a wider audience.
Figure 3. Several deformations in Balinese palm leaf manuscript images [1]
Figure 4. Several deformations in Khmer palm leaf manuscript images
All researchers are invited to participate in the challenge described in the "Challenge" section.