RESUMO
Many Javanese manuscripts in Indonesia are stored in museums and libraries. Most of these manuscripts were written using local scripts that are rarely used in everyday life, and hence a software application that can help and improve the reading of these manuscripts is valuable. An essential step in automatic manuscript image transliteration is post-processing, which involves editing and concatenating syllables into words. The main problem of post-processing is that there exists no symbol for space between words in a sentence, which is called the scriptio-continua problem. This paper proposes methods based on the backtracking algorithm to solve the scriptio continua in the post-processing step of Javanese manuscript image transliteration. The proposed methods use a depth-first search in seeking relevant candidate words to determine whether to merge a new syllable or not. The results of the proposed methods to concatenate 17,687 syllables from the Hamong Tani book using a dictionary containing 49,801 words are found to be satisfactory in terms of computation and accuracy. The accuracy of the implemented greedy and brute-force methods is both 81.64%. However, the greedy-based method is more efficient and has a better performance than the brute-force method.
