mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Combining OCR Models for Reading Early Modern Printed Books

arXiv 2305.07131 ↗First posted 11 May 2023cs.CVcited by 1

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Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we investigate the usage of fine-grained font recognition on OCR for books printed from the 15th to the 18th century. We used a newly created dataset for OCR of early printed books for which fonts are labeled with bounding boxes. We know not only the font group used for each character, but the locations of font changes as well. In books of this period, we frequently find font group changes mid-line or even mid-word that indicate changes in language. We consider 8 different font groups present in our corpus and investigate 13 different subsets: the whole dataset and text lines with a single font, multiple fonts, Roman fonts, Gothic fonts, and each of the considered fonts, respectively. We show that OCR performance is strongly impacted by font style and that selecting fine-tuned models with font group recognition has a very positive impact on the results. Moreover, we developed a system using local font group recognition in order to combine the output of multiple font recognition models, and show that while slower, this approach performs better not only on text lines composed of multiple fonts but on the ones containing a single font only as well.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 18 of its 37 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 May 2023.

Builds on

18 of 37 references.

References · 18

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6 more
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Citing papers per year: 2023: 1.

1 paper.

  1. 2023Efficient Annotation of Medieval Charterscited by 0