Diptychon is a research project funded by the German Research Foundation. It investigates a method that enables palaeographers to precisely extract the individual letters of arbitrary handwritings out of document images.

There are no constraints which restrict the kind of handwriting to be analysed. Instead, the system looks at handwritings from a pure topological point of view: There are only connected regions which need to be detected and sometimes they need either to be separated into subregions or put together to noncontiguous regions.

While heuristics can be defined which decide to treat regions in the appropriate way, regarding cursive handwritings cases can always be found which can be hardly treated automatically. It is therefore the idea of Diptychon to let the system make suggestions as to how to treat regions and to provide interactive tools which enable the user to correct those suggestions if necessary.