# PLATTER: A Page-Level Handwritten Text Recognition System for Indic Scripts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06172 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06172/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [An End-to-End Trainable Neural Network for Image-based Sequence Recognition and Its Application to Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.05717/) (2015)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)
- [GCNet: Non-local Networks Meet Squeeze-Excitation Networks and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11492/) (2019)
- [EAST: An Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03155/) (2017)
- [LinkNet: Exploiting Encoder Representations for Efficient Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03718/) (2017)
- [Real-time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08947/) (2019)
- [Scene Text Recognition with Permuted Autoregressive Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06966/) (2022)
- [Shape Robust Text Detection with Progressive Scale Expansion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12473/) (2019)
- [Show, Attend and Read: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Irregular Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00751/) (2018)
- [TextBoxes: A Fast Text Detector with a Single Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06779/) (2016)
- [TextBoxes++: A Single-Shot Oriented Scene Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02765/) (2018)
- [TextSnake: A Flexible Representation for Detecting Text of Arbitrary Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01544/) (2018)
- [Real-Time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization and Adaptive Scale Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10304/) (2022)
- [Detecting Oriented Text in Natural Images by Linking Segments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06520/) (2017)
- [Fourier Contour Embedding for Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10442/) (2021)
- [ScrabbleGAN: Semi-Supervised Varying Length Handwritten Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10557/) (2020)
- [PixelLink: Detecting Scene Text via Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01315/) (2018)
- [DPText-DETR: Towards Better Scene Text Detection with Dynamic Points in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04491/) (2022)
- [A Large Multi-Target Dataset of Common Bengali Handwritten Graphemes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00170/) (2020)
- [BanglaWriting: A multi-purpose offline Bangla handwriting dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07499/) (2020)
- [Faster DAN: Multi-target Queries with Document Positional Encoding for End-to-end Handwritten Document Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10593/) (2023)
- [ICDAR 2015 Text Reading in the Wild Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03184/) (2015)
- [Improving Handwritten OCR with Training Samples Generated by Glyph Conditional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19543/) (2023)
- [HMM-based Indic Handwritten Word Recognition using Zone Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00227/) (2017)
- [TEXTRON: Weakly Supervised Multilingual Text Detection through Data Programming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09811/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Seeing Justice Clearly: Handwritten Legal Document Translation with OCR and Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18004/) (2025)
- [DohaScript: A Large-Scale Multi-Writer Dataset for Continuous Handwritten Hindi Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18089/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, the field of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) has seen the emergence of various new models, each claiming to perform competitively better than the other in specific scenarios. However, making a fair comparison of these models is challenging due to inconsistent choices and diversity in test sets. Furthermore, recent advancements in HTR often fail to account for the diverse languages, especially Indic languages, likely due to the scarcity of relevant labeled datasets. Moreover, much of the previous work has focused primarily on character-level or word-level recognition, overlooking the crucial stage of Handwritten Text Detection (HTD) necessary for building a page-level end-to-end handwritten OCR pipeline. Through our paper, we address these gaps by making three pivotal contributions. Firstly, we present an end-to-end framework for Page-Level hAndwriTTen TExt Recognition (PLATTER) by treating it as a two-stage problem involving word-level HTD followed by HTR. This approach enables us to identify, assess, and address challenges in each stage independently. Secondly, we demonstrate the usage of PLATTER to measure the performance of our language-agnostic HTD model and present a consistent comparison of six trained HTR models on ten diverse Indic languages thereby encouraging consistent comparisons. Finally, we also release a Corpus of Handwritten Indic Scripts (CHIPS), a meticulously curated, page-level Indic handwritten OCR dataset labeled for both detection and recognition purposes. Additionally, we release our code and trained models, to encourage further contributions in this direction.