A Comprehensive Study of ImageNet Pre-Training for Historical Document Image Analysis

Automatic analysis of scanned historical documents comprises a wide range of image analysis tasks, which are often challenging for machine learning due to a lack of human-annotated learning samples. With the advent of deep neural networks, a promising way to cope with the lack of training data is to pre-train models on images from a different domain and then fine-tune them on historical documents. In the current research, a typical example of such cross-domain transfer learning is the use of neural networks that have been pre-trained on the ImageNet database for object recognition. It remains a mostly open question whether or not this pre-training helps to analyse historical documents, which have fundamentally different image properties when compared with ImageNet. In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical survey on the effect of ImageNet pre-training for diverse historical document analysis tasks, including character recognition, style classification, manuscript dating, semantic segmentation, and content-based retrieval. While we obtain mixed results for semantic segmentation at pixel-level, we observe a clear trend across different network architectures that ImageNet pre-training has a positive effect on classification as well as content-based retrieval

State Of The Art In Digital Paleography

Digital paleography is an approach used to assist paleographers in deciding the origin of manuscripts. This is done by recording types of writings present in old manuscripts. It uses digital representation of book hands as a tool to support paleographical analyses by, human experts. There are six types of manuscripts selected which are Arabic, Chinese, Jawi, Indian, Latin and Roman. These types of manuscripts are discussed through their current contribution in the digital paleography field. The main purpose of this paper is to discuss the current work on digital paleography for selected types of manuscripts. Thus, we identified the approaches and methods used to define the types of handwritings in old manuscript