8. The computer-implemented method according to claim 5 , wherein said preprocessing steps include a segmentation procedure comprising the steps of: determining a baseline of text of said Arabic historical manuscripts images by calculating a horizontal projection profile, said horizontal projection profile calculation being characterized by the relation: 
 P i =ΣImg( i,j ) where P(i,j) is the horizontal projection of the image for row i, and the Img(i,j) is the pixel value at (i, j); based on said baseline determination, segmenting a line image to connected component images comprised of subwords of said images; and tagging each said subword with page number and line number information to facilitate storage and retrieval of said image subword.
8. The computer-implemented method according to claim 5 , wherein said preprocessing steps include a segmentation procedure comprising the steps of: determining a baseline of text of said Arabic historical manuscripts images by calculating a horizontal projection profile, said horizontal projection profile calculation being characterized by the relation: 
 P i =ΣImg( i,j ) where P(i,j) is the horizontal projection of the image for row i, and the Img(i,j) is the pixel value at (i, j); based on said baseline determination, segmenting a line image to connected component images comprised of subwords of said images; and tagging each said subword with page number and line number information to facilitate storage and retrieval of said image subword. 9. The computer-implemented method according to claim 8 , wherein said returned document images display step further comprises displaying image thumbnails of said image subwords matched according to said query matching process.