FP-THD: Full page transcription of historical documents

TL;DR

This paper introduces FP-THD, a pipeline that combines layout analysis and OCR to transcribe Latin historical documents from the 15th and 16th centuries, preserving their original style and symbols.

Contribution

It extends existing text recognition methods with layout analysis to produce full-page transcriptions of complex historical documents.

Findings

Effective processing of handwritten and printed texts

High accuracy in multi-language document transcription

Versatile pipeline adaptable to various historical document types

Abstract

The transcription of historical documents written in Latin in XV and XVI centuries has special challenges as it must maintain the characters and special symbols that have distinct meanings to ensure that historical texts retain their original style and significance. This work proposes a pipeline for the transcription of historical documents preserving these special features. We propose to extend an existing text line recognition method with a layout analysis model. We analyze historical text images using a layout analysis model to extract text lines, which are then processed by an OCR model to generate a fully digitized page. We showed that our pipeline facilitates the processing of the page and produces an efficient result. We evaluated our approach on multiple datasets and demonstrate that the masked autoencoder effectively processes different types of text, including handwritten, printed and multi-language.