Related papers: Improving OCR Quality in 19th Century Historical D…
This research digitizes and analyzes the Leidse hoogleraren en lectoren 1575-1815 books written between 1983 and 1985, which contain biographic data about professors and curators of Leiden University. It addresses the central question: how…
In this paper we evaluate Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of 19th century Fraktur scripts without book-specific training using mixed models, i.e. models trained to recognize a variety of fonts and typesets from previously unseen…
Iterating with new and improved OCR solutions enforces decision making when it comes to targeting the right candidates for reprocessing. This especially applies when the underlying data collection is of considerable size and rather diverse…
Text line segmentation is one of the pre-stages of modern optical character recognition systems. The algorithmic approach proposed by this paper has been designed for this exact purpose. Its main characteristic is the combination of two…
Kurdish libraries have many historical publications that were printed back in the early days when printing devices were brought to Kurdistan. Having a good Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to help process these publications and…
Good OCR results for historical printings rely on the availability of recognition models trained on diplomatic transcriptions as ground truth, which is both a scarce resource and time-consuming to generate. Instead of having to train a…
Optical character recognition (OCR) for historical documents is a complex procedure subject to a unique set of material issues, including inconsistencies in typefaces and low quality scanning. Consequently, even the most sophisticated OCR…
We explore how multimodal Large Language Models (mLLMs) can help researchers transcribe historical documents, extract relevant historical information, and construct datasets from historical sources. Specifically, we investigate the…
Digitization of historical documents is a challenging task in many digital humanities projects. A popular approach for digitization is to scan the documents into images, and then convert images into text using Optical Character Recognition…
The age of artificial intelligence has brought many new possibilities and pitfalls in many fields and tasks. The devil is in the details, and those come to the fore when building new pipelines and executing small practical experiments. OCR…
In order to apply Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to historical printings of Latin script fully automatically, we report on our efforts to construct a widely-applicable polyfont recognition model yielding text with a Character Error…
We investigate how to train a high quality optical character recognition (OCR) model for difficult historical typefaces on degraded paper. Through extensive grid searches, we obtain a neural network architecture and a set of optimal data…
Current OCR systems are based on deep learning models trained on large amounts of data. Although they have shown some ability to generalize to unseen data, especially in detection tasks, they can struggle with recognizing low-quality data.…
The record of the beginning of the most widespread legal system in the world is contained in millions of pages of handwritten text. Most of the records of the first centuries of the Anglo-American legal system are hand-written in a highly…
For the bachelor project 2021 of Professor Lippert's research group, handwritten entries of historical patient records needed to be digitized using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) methods. Since the data will be used in the future, a…
The digitisation of historical print media archives is crucial for increasing accessibility to contemporary records. However, the process of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) used to convert physical records to digital text is prone to…
OCR errors are common in digitised historical archives significantly affecting their usability and value. Generative Language Models (LMs) have shown potential for correcting these errors using the context provided by the corrupted text and…
Retrieving accurate details from documents is a crucial task, especially when handling a combination of scanned images and native digital formats. This document presents a combined framework for text extraction that merges Optical Character…
This paper presents our methodology and findings from three tasks across Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Document Layout Analysis using advanced deep learning techniques. First, for the historical Hebrew fragments of the Dead Sea…
Digital humanities scholars increasingly use Large Language Models for historical document digitization, yet lack appropriate evaluation frameworks for LLM-based OCR. Traditional metrics fail to capture temporal biases and period-specific…