PLATTER: A Page-Level Handwritten Text Recognition System for Indic Scripts

TL;DR

This paper introduces PLATTER, an end-to-end page-level handwritten text recognition system for Indic scripts, addressing challenges in fair model comparison, language diversity, and detection-recognition integration, supported by a new dataset and open-source tools.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel two-stage framework for page-level handwritten OCR of Indic scripts, including a new dataset and a comprehensive evaluation methodology.

Findings

Consistent comparison of six HTR models across ten Indic languages.

Effective end-to-end recognition pipeline for Indic handwritten text.

Public release of CHIPS dataset, code, and trained models.

Abstract

In recent years, the field of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) has seen the emergence of various new models, each claiming to perform competitively better than the other in specific scenarios. However, making a fair comparison of these models is challenging due to inconsistent choices and diversity in test sets. Furthermore, recent advancements in HTR often fail to account for the diverse languages, especially Indic languages, likely due to the scarcity of relevant labeled datasets. Moreover, much of the previous work has focused primarily on character-level or word-level recognition, overlooking the crucial stage of Handwritten Text Detection (HTD) necessary for building a page-level end-to-end handwritten OCR pipeline. Through our paper, we address these gaps by making three pivotal contributions. Firstly, we present an end-to-end framework for Page-Level hAndwriTTen TExt Recognition (PLATTER) by treating it as a two-stage problem involving word-level HTD followed by HTR. This approach enables us to identify, assess, and address challenges in each stage independently. Secondly, we demonstrate the usage of PLATTER to measure the performance of our language-agnostic HTD model and present a consistent comparison of six trained HTR models on ten diverse Indic languages thereby encouraging consistent comparisons. Finally, we also release a Corpus of Handwritten Indic Scripts (CHIPS), a meticulously curated, page-level Indic handwritten OCR dataset labeled for both detection and recognition purposes. Additionally, we release our code and trained models, to encourage further contributions in this direction.