117 research outputs found
Transfer Learning for OCRopus Model Training on Early Printed Books
A method is presented that significantly reduces the character error rates
for OCR text obtained from OCRopus models trained on early printed books when
only small amounts of diplomatic transcriptions are available. This is achieved
by building from already existing models during training instead of starting
from scratch. To overcome the discrepancies between the set of characters of
the pretrained model and the additional ground truth the OCRopus code is
adapted to allow for alphabet expansion or reduction. The character set is now
capable of flexibly adding and deleting characters from the pretrained alphabet
when an existing model is loaded. For our experiments we use a self-trained
mixed model on early Latin prints and the two standard OCRopus models on modern
English and German Fraktur texts. The evaluation on seven early printed books
showed that training from the Latin mixed model reduces the average amount of
errors by 43% and 26%, respectively compared to training from scratch with 60
and 150 lines of ground truth, respectively. Furthermore, it is shown that even
building from mixed models trained on data unrelated to the newly added
training and test data can lead to significantly improved recognition results
State of the Art Optical Character Recognition of 19th Century Fraktur Scripts using Open Source Engines
In this paper we evaluate Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of 19th century
Fraktur scripts without book-specific training using mixed models, i.e. models
trained to recognize a variety of fonts and typesets from previously unseen
sources. We describe the training process leading to strong mixed OCR models
and compare them to freely available models of the popular open source engines
OCRopus and Tesseract as well as the commercial state of the art system ABBYY.
For evaluation, we use a varied collection of unseen data from books, journals,
and a dictionary from the 19th century. The experiments show that training
mixed models with real data is superior to training with synthetic data and
that the novel OCR engine Calamari outperforms the other engines considerably,
on average reducing ABBYYs character error rate (CER) by over 70%, resulting in
an average CER below 1%.Comment: Submitted to DHd 2019 (https://dhd2019.org/) which demands a...
creative... submission format. Consequently, some captions might look weird
and some links aren't clickable. Extended version with more technical details
and some fixes to follo
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