# BanglaWriting: A multi-purpose offline Bangla handwriting dataset

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07499 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07499/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [HWD: A Novel Evaluation Score for Styled Handwritten Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20316/) (2023)
- [Handwritten Word Recognition using Deep Learning Approach: A Novel Way of Generating Handwritten Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07514/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Optical Character Recognition for Bengali Handwritten Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04020/) (2021)
- [LILA-BOTI : Leveraging Isolated Letter Accumulations By Ordering Teacher Insights for Bangla Handwriting Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11420/) (2022)
- [BN-HTRd: A Benchmark Dataset for Document Level Offline Bangla Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) and Line Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08977/) (2022)
- [PLATTER: A Page-Level Handwritten Text Recognition System for Indic Scripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06172/) (2025)
- [BN-DRISHTI: Bangla Document Recognition through Instance-level Segmentation of Handwritten Text Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09351/) (2023)
- [Optical Text Recognition in Nepali and Bengali: A Transformer-based Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02375/) (2024)
- [GraDeT-HTR: A Resource-Efficient Bengali Handwritten Text Recognition System utilizing Grapheme-based Tokenizer and Decoder-only Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18081/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This article presents a Bangla handwriting dataset named BanglaWriting that contains single-page handwritings of 260 individuals of different personalities and ages. Each page includes bounding-boxes that bounds each word, along with the unicode representation of the writing. This dataset contains 21,234 words and 32,787 characters in total. Moreover, this dataset includes 5,470 unique words of Bangla vocabulary. Apart from the usual words, the dataset comprises 261 comprehensible overwriting and 450 handwritten strikes and mistakes. All of the bounding-boxes and word labels are manually-generated. The dataset can be used for complex optical character/word recognition, writer identification, handwritten word segmentation, and word generation. Furthermore, this dataset is suitable for extracting age-based and gender-based variation of handwriting.