TexT - Text Extractor Tool for Handwritten Document Transcription and Annotation

TL;DR

The paper introduces TexT, a semi-automatic tool for transcribing and annotating large-scale handwritten documents efficiently, using a word spotting system and interactive features to improve accuracy and usability.

Contribution

It presents a novel user-friendly text extractor tool that combines word spotting with on-the-fly annotation and correction for handwritten document transcription.

Findings

Effective on archival manuscript datasets

Enables quick and accurate transcription

Supports dynamic annotation correction

Abstract

This paper presents a framework for semi-automatic transcription of large-scale historical handwritten documents and proposes a simple user-friendly text extractor tool, TexT for transcription. The proposed approach provides a quick and easy transcription of text using computer assisted interactive technique. The algorithm finds multiple occurrences of the marked text on-the-fly using a word spotting system. TexT is also capable of performing on-the-fly annotation of handwritten text with automatic generation of ground truth labels, and dynamic adjustment and correction of user generated bounding box annotations with the word being perfectly encapsulated. The user can view the document and the found words in the original form or with background noise removed for easier visualization of transcription results. The effectiveness of TexT is demonstrated on an archival manuscript collection from well-known publicly available dataset.