# Scalable handwritten text recognition system for lexicographic sources of under-resourced languages and alphabets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.16256 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16256/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)
- [Character Region Awareness for Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01941/) (2019)
- [Synthetic Data and Artificial Neural Networks for Natural Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2227/) (2014)
- [What Is Wrong With Scene Text Recognition Model Comparisons? Dataset and Model Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01906/) (2019)
- [Matching Handwritten Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05923/) (2016)
- [Robust Text Detection in Natural Scene Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.2628/) (2013)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The paper discusses an approach to decipher large collections of handwritten index cards of historical dictionaries. Our study provides a working solution that reads the cards, and links their lemmas to a searchable list of dictionary entries, for a large historical dictionary entitled the Dictionary of the 17th- and 18th-century Polish, which comprizes 2.8 million index cards. We apply a tailored handwritten text recognition (HTR) solution that involves (1) an optimized detection model; (2) a recognition model to decipher the handwritten content, designed as a spatial transformer network (STN) followed by convolutional neural network (RCNN) with a connectionist temporal classification layer (CTC), trained using a synthetic set of 500,000 generated Polish words of different length; (3) a post-processing step using constrained Word Beam Search (WBC): the predictions were matched against a list of dictionary entries known in advance. Our model achieved the accuracy of 0.881 on the word level, which outperforms the base RCNN model. Within this study we produced a set of 20,000 manually annotated index cards that can be used for future benchmarks and transfer learning HTR applications.