On-the-fly Historical Handwritten Text Annotation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quick, on-the-fly method for annotating degraded historical handwritten texts, enabling dynamic correction of labels to improve data quality for retrieval tasks.

Contribution

It proposes a novel, simple approach for real-time annotation and correction of degraded handwritten text in ancient manuscripts.

Findings

Effective in generating accurate word bounding boxes

Improves annotation speed and accuracy for degraded texts

Validated on publicly available archival datasets

Abstract

The performance of information retrieval algorithms depends upon the availability of ground truth labels annotated by experts. This is an important prerequisite, and difficulties arise when the annotated ground truth labels are incorrect or incomplete due to high levels of degradation. To address this problem, this paper presents a simple method to perform on-the-fly annotation of degraded historical handwritten text in ancient manuscripts. The proposed method aims at quick generation of ground truth and correction of inaccurate annotations such that the bounding box perfectly encapsulates the word, and contains no added noise from the background or surroundings. This method will potentially be of help to historians and researchers in generating and correcting word labels in a document dynamically. The effectiveness of the annotation method is empirically evaluated on an archival manuscript collection from well-known publicly available datasets.