This paper presents a framework for semi-automatic transcription of large-scale historical handwritten documents and proposes a simple user-friendly text extractor tool, TexT for transcription. The proposed approach provides a quick and easy transcription of text using computer assisted interactive technique. The algorithm finds multiple occurrences of the marked text on-the-fly using a word spotting system. TexT is also capable of performing on-the-fly annotation of handwritten text with automatic generation of ground truth labels, and dynamic adjustment and correction of user generated bounding box annotations with the word being perfectly encapsulated. The user can view the document and the found words in the original form or with background noise removed for easier visualization of transcription results. The effectiveness of TexT is demonstrated on an archival manuscript collection from well-known publicly available dataset.
An active learning based handwritten text transcription method is proposed in @cite_5 that performs a sequential line-by-line transcription of the document, and a continuously re-trained system interacts with the end-user to efficiently transcribe each line.
@cite_5
2022080924 1995047052 2343436474 2613219935
Active learning strategies are being increasingly used in a variety of real-world tasks, though their application to handwritten text transcription in old manuscripts remains nearly unexplored. The basic idea is to follow a sequential, line-byline transcription of the whole manuscript in which a continuously retrained system interacts with the user to efficiently transcribe each new line. This approach has been recently explored using a conventional strategy by which the user is only asked to supervise words that are not recognized with high confidence. In this paper, the conventional strategy is improved by also letting the system to recompute most probable hypotheses with the constraints imposed by user supervisions. In particular, two strategies are studied which differ in the frequency of hypothesis recomputation on the current line: after each (iterative) or all (delayed) user corrections. Empirical results are reported on two real tasks showing that these strategies outperform the conventional approach. An effective approach to transcribe handwritten text documents is to follow an interactive-predictive paradigm in which both, the system is guided by the user, and the user is assisted by the system to complete the transcription task as efficiently as possible. This approach has been recently implemented in a system prototype called GIDOC, in which standard speech technology is adapted to handwritten text (line) images: HMM-based text image modelling, n-gram language modelling, and also confidence measures on recognized words. Confidence measures are used to assist the user in locating possible transcription errors, and thus validate system output after only supervising those (few) words for which the system is not highly confident. Here, we study the effect of using these partially supervised transcriptions on the adaptation of image and language models to the task. Offline handwriting recognition systems require cropped text line images for both training and recognition. On the one hand, the annotation of position and transcript at line level is costly to obtain. On the other hand, automatic line segmentation algorithms are prone to errors, compromising the subsequent recognition. In this paper, we propose a modification of the popular and efficient multi-dimensional long short-term memory recurrent neural networks (MDLSTM-RNNs) to enable end-to-end processing of handwritten paragraphs. More particularly, we replace the collapse layer transforming the two-dimensional representation into a sequence of predictions by a recurrent version which can recognize one line at a time. In the proposed model, a neural network performs a kind of implicit line segmentation by computing attention weights on the image representation. The experiments on paragraphs of Rimes and IAM database yield results that are competitive with those of networks trained at line level, and constitute a significant step towards end-to-end transcription of full documents. To provide access to the contents of the document collections that are being digitized, transcription is required. Unfortunately manual transcription is generally too expensive and, in most cases, current automatic techniques fail to provide the required level of accuracy. An alternative that can speed up and lower the cost of this process is the use of computer assisted, interactive techniques. These techniques work at line-level thus the transcription task assumes that the page images have been correctly decomposed into the relevant text line images. In this paper we present an end-to-end system that takes as input a page image and provides a fully correct transcript with the help of user interaction. The system automatically performs the text block and text line detection to be fed into the interactive computer assisted transcription. Experiments carried out show that the expected amount of user effort needed to produce perfect transcripts, can be reduced by using the proposed end-to-end system.