# HORAE: an annotated dataset of books of hours

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.00351 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00351/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

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- [Robust Text Line Detection in Historical Documents: Learning and Evaluation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12346/) (2022)
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- [METATR: A Multilingual, Evolving Benchmark for Automatic Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26712/) (2026)
- [Confidence Estimation for Object Detection in Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13391/) (2022)
- [Archival Faces: Detection of Faces in Digitized Historical Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00558/) (2025)
- [From Codicology to Code: A Comparative Study of Transformer and YOLO-based Detectors for Layout Analysis in Historical Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20326/) (2025)
- [iDocV2: Leveraging Self-Supervision and Open-Set Detection for Improving Pattern Spotting in Historical Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16726/) (2026)
- [Text region detection in historical astronomical diagrams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15886/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce in this paper a new dataset of annotated pages from books of hours, a type of handwritten prayer books owned and used by rich lay people in the late middle ages. The dataset was created for conducting historical research on the evolution of the religious mindset in Europe at this period since the book of hours represent one of the major sources of information thanks both to their rich illustrations and the different types of religious sources they contain. We first describe how the corpus was collected and manually annotated then present the evaluation of a state-of-the-art system for text line detection and for zone detection and typing. The corpus is freely available for research.