# Impact of Ground Truth Quality on Handwriting Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09037 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09037/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2023.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [TrOCR: Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10282/) (2021)
- [Labeling, Cutting, Grouping: an Efficient Text Line Segmentation Method for Medieval Manuscripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.11894/) (2019)
- [Impact of Ground Truth Annotation Quality on Performance of Semantic Image Segmentation of Traffic Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00001/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [CTC Transcription Alignment of the Bullinger Letters: Automatic Improvement of Annotation Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07904/) (2025)
- [BullingerDB: A Dataset for Handwritten Text Recognition and Writer Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30235/) (2026)
- [Revising RVL-CDIP: Quantifying Errors and Test-Train Overlap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31446/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Handwriting recognition is a key technology for accessing the content of old manuscripts, helping to preserve cultural heritage. Deep learning shows an impressive performance in solving this task. However, to achieve its full potential, it requires a large amount of labeled data, which is difficult to obtain for ancient languages and scripts. Often, a trade-off has to be made between ground truth quantity and quality, as is the case for the recently introduced Bullinger database. It contains an impressive amount of over a hundred thousand labeled text line images of mostly premodern German and Latin texts that were obtained by automatically aligning existing page-level transcriptions with text line images. However, the alignment process introduces systematic errors, such as wrongly hyphenated words. In this paper, we investigate the impact of such errors on training and evaluation and suggest means to detect and correct typical alignment errors.