# ClapperText: A Benchmark for Text Recognition in Low-Resource Archival Documents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15557 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15557/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (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)
- [COCO-Text: Dataset and Benchmark for Text Detection and Recognition in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.07140/) (2016)
- [Synthetic Data and Artificial Neural Networks for Natural Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2227/) (2014)
- [Real-time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08947/) (2019)
- [Total-Text: A Comprehensive Dataset for Scene Text Detection and Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10400/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Reading Text in the Wild with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1842/) (2014)
- [TextSnake: A Flexible Representation for Detecting Text of Arbitrary Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01544/) (2018)
- [Scene Text Detection and Recognition: The Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04256/) (2018)
- [Efficient and Accurate Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection with Pixel Aggregation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05900/) (2019)
- [From Two to One: A New Scene Text Recognizer with Visual Language Modeling Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09661/) (2021)
- [Towards End-to-End Unified Scene Text Detection and Layout Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15143/) (2022)
- [Real-Time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization and Adaptive Scale Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10304/) (2022)
- [SVTR: Scene Text Recognition with a Single Visual Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00159/) (2022)
- [RobustScanner: Dynamically Enhancing Positional Clues for Robust Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07542/) (2020)
- [Fourier Contour Embedding for Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10442/) (2021)
- [NRTR: A No-Recurrence Sequence-to-Sequence Model For Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00926/) (2018)
- [MASTER: Multi-Aspect Non-local Network for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02562/) (2019)
- [RoadText-1K: Text Detection & Recognition Dataset for Driving Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09496/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents ClapperText, a benchmark dataset for handwritten and printed text recognition in visually degraded and low-resource settings. The dataset is derived from 127 World War II-era archival video segments containing clapperboards that record structured production metadata such as date, location, and camera-operator identity. ClapperText includes 9,813 annotated frames and 94,573 word-level text instances, 67% of which are handwritten and 1,566 are partially occluded. Each instance includes transcription, semantic category, text type, and occlusion status, with annotations available as rotated bounding boxes represented as 4-point polygons to support spatially precise OCR applications. Recognizing clapperboard text poses significant challenges, including motion blur, handwriting variation, exposure fluctuations, and cluttered backgrounds, mirroring broader challenges in historical document analysis where structured content appears in degraded, non-standard forms. We provide both full-frame annotations and cropped word images to support downstream tasks. Using a consistent per-video evaluation protocol, we benchmark six representative recognition and seven detection models under zero-shot and fine-tuned conditions. Despite the small training set (18 videos), fine-tuning leads to substantial performance gains, highlighting ClapperText's suitability for few-shot learning scenarios. The dataset offers a realistic and culturally grounded resource for advancing robust OCR and document understanding in low-resource archival contexts. The dataset and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/linty5/ClapperText.