Automated Error Detection in Digitized Cultural Heritage Documents

International audienceThe work reported in this paper aims at performance optimization in the digitization of documents pertaining to the cultural heritage domain. A hybrid method is roposed, combining statistical classification algorithms and linguistic knowledge to automatize post-OCR error detection and correction. The current paper deals with the integration of linguistic modules and their impact on error detection

Automated Error Detection in Digitized Cultural Heritage Documents

International audienceThe work reported in this paper aims at performance optimization in the digitization of documents pertaining to the cultural heritage domain. A hybrid method is roposed, combining statistical classification algorithms and linguistic knowledge to automatize post-OCR error detection and correction. The current paper deals with the integration of linguistic modules and their impact on error detection

Access to recorded interviews: A research agenda

Recorded interviews form a rich basis for scholarly inquiry. Examples include oral histories, community memory projects, and interviews conducted for broadcast media. Emerging technologies offer the potential to radically transform the way in which recorded interviews are made accessible, but this vision will demand substantial investments from a broad range of research communities. This article reviews the present state of practice for making recorded interviews available and the state-of-the-art for key component technologies. A large number of important research issues are identified, and from that set of issues, a coherent research agenda is proposed

Bridging communities of practice: Emerging technologies for content-centered linking

The project fosters convergence between two communities by addressing complementary aspects of a shared opportunity. Digital humanists are at the forefront of developing ways to render cultural heritage metadata increasingly interoperable as linked open data in tandem with information professionals working in libraries, archives, and museums. Computer scientists are developing automated techniques for extracting linkable data from the content itself. Bringing these communities together offers transformational potential for the application of a critical infrastructure in humanities scholarship. Two workshops will be organized to seize this unique opportunity. The first will bring together humanities scholars and computer scientists to explore applications of new content linking technologies to dispersed and disparate material. In the second, a larger group of humanities scholars will identify specific content to which techniques described in the previous workshop will be applied

ICDAR 2019 Competition on Post-OCR Text Correction

International audienceThis paper describes the second round of the ICDAR 2019 competition on post-OCR text correction and presents the different methods submitted by the participants. OCR has been an active research field for over the past 30 years but results are still imperfect, especially for historical documents. The purpose of this competition is to compare and evaluate automatic approaches for correcting (denoising) OCR-ed texts. The present challenge consists of two tasks: 1) error detection and 2) error correction. An original dataset of 22M OCR-ed symbols along with an aligned ground truth was provided to the participants with 80% of the dataset dedicated to training and 20% to evaluation. Different sources were aggregated and contain newspapers, historical printed documents as well as manuscripts and shopping receipts, covering 10 European languages (Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, English, Finish, French, German, Polish, Spanish and Slovak). Five teams submitted results, the error detection scores vary from 41 to 95% and the best error correction improvement is 44%. This competition, which counted 34 registrations, illustrates the strong interest of the community to improve OCR output, which is a key issue to any digitization process involving textual data

Innovative Techniques for Digitizing and Restoring Deteriorated Historical Documents

Recent large-scale document digitization initiatives have created new modes of access to modern library collections with the development of new hardware and software technologies. Most commonly, these digitization projects focus on accurately scanning bound texts, some reaching an efficiency of more than one million volumes per year. While vast digital collections are changing the way users access texts, current scanning paradigms can not handle many non-standard materials. Documentation forms such as manuscripts, scrolls, codices, deteriorated film, epigraphy, and rock art all hold a wealth of human knowledge in physical forms not accessible by standard book scanning technologies. This great omission motivates the development of new technology, presented by this thesis, that is not-only effective with deteriorated bound works, damaged manuscripts, and disintegrating photonegatives but also easily utilized by non-technical staff. First, a novel point light source calibration technique is presented that can be performed by library staff. Then, a photometric correction technique which uses known illumination and surface properties to remove shading distortions in deteriorated document images can be automatically applied. To complete the restoration process, a geometric correction is applied. Also unique to this work is the development of an image-based uncalibrated document scanner that utilizes the transmissivity of document substrates. This scanner extracts intrinsic document color information from one or both sides of a document. Simultaneously, the document shape is estimated to obtain distortion information. Lastly, this thesis provides a restoration framework for damaged photographic negatives that corrects photometric and geometric distortions. Current restoration techniques for the discussed form of negatives require physical manipulation to the photograph. The novel acquisition and restoration system presented here provides the first known solution to digitize and restore deteriorated photographic negatives without damaging the original negative in any way. This thesis work develops new methods of document scanning and restoration suitable for wide-scale deployment. By creating easy to access technologies, library staff can implement their own scanning initiatives and large-scale scanning projects can expand their current document-sets

Transcribing a 17th-century botanical manuscript: Longitudinal evaluation of document layout detection and interactive transcription

[EN] We present a process for cost-effective transcription of cursive handwritten text images that has been tested on a 1,000-page 17th-century book about botanical species. The process comprised two main tasks, namely: (1) preprocessing: page layout analysis, text line detection, and extraction; and (2) transcription of the extracted text line images. Both tasks were carried out with semiautomatic pro- cedures, aimed at incrementally minimizing user correction effort, by means of computer-assisted line detection and interactive handwritten text recognition technologies. The contribution derived from this work is three-fold. First, we provide a detailed human-supervised transcription of a relatively large historical handwritten book, ready to be searchable, indexable, and accessible to cultural heritage scholars as well as the general public. Second, we have conducted the first longitudinal study to date on interactive handwriting text recognition, for which we provide a very comprehensive user assessment of the real-world per- formance of the technologies involved in this work. Third, as a result of this process, we have produced a detailed transcription and document layout infor- mation (i.e. high-quality labeled data) ready to be used by researchers working on automated technologies for document analysis and recognition.This work is supported by the European Commission through the EU projects HIMANIS (JPICH program, Spanish, grant Ref. PCIN-2015-068) and READ (Horizon-2020 program, grant Ref. 674943); and the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (grant number SP20130189). This work was also part of the Valorization and I+D+i Resources program of VLC/CAMPUS and has been funded by the Spanish MECD as part of the International Excellence Campus program.Toselli, AH.; Leiva, LA.; Bordes-Cabrera, I.; Hernández-Tornero, C.; Bosch Campos, V.; Vidal, E. (2018). Transcribing a 17th-century botanical manuscript: Longitudinal evaluation of document layout detection and interactive transcription. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. 33(1):173-202. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqw064S173202331Bazzi, I., Schwartz, R., & Makhoul, J. (1999). An omnifont open-vocabulary OCR system for English and Arabic. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 21(6), 495-504. doi:10.1109/34.771314Causer, T., Tonra, J., & Wallace, V. (2012). Transcription maximized; expense minimized? Crowdsourcing and editing The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham*. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 27(2), 119-137. doi:10.1093/llc/fqs004Ramel, J. Y., Leriche, S., Demonet, M. L., & Busson, S. (2007). User-driven page layout analysis of historical printed books. International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR), 9(2-4), 243-261. doi:10.1007/s10032-007-0040-6Romero, V., Fornés, A., Serrano, N., Sánchez, J. A., Toselli, A. H., Frinken, V., … Lladós, J. (2013). The ESPOSALLES database: An ancient marriage license corpus for off-line handwriting recognition. Pattern Recognition, 46(6), 1658-1669. doi:10.1016/j.patcog.2012.11.024Romero, V., Toselli, A. H., & Vidal, E. (2012). Multimodal Interactive Handwritten Text Transcription. Series in Machine Perception and Artificial Intelligence. doi:10.1142/8394Toselli, A. H., Romero, V., Pastor, M., & Vidal, E. (2010). Multimodal interactive transcription of text images. Pattern Recognition, 43(5), 1814-1825. doi:10.1016/j.patcog.2009.11.019Toselli, A. H., Vidal, E., Romero, V., & Frinken, V. (2016). HMM word graph based keyword spotting in handwritten document images. Information Sciences, 370-371, 497-518. doi:10.1016/j.ins.2016.07.063Bunke, H., Bengio, S., & Vinciarelli, A. (2004). Offline recognition of unconstrained handwritten texts using HMMs and statistical language models. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 26(6), 709-720. doi:10.1109/tpami.2004.1