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Semantic Segmentation of Historical Documents via Fully-Convolutional Neural Network

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11658))

Abstract

This paper presents a method for character semantic segmentation in full-text documents from post World War II Czechoslovakia. Unfortunately, standard optical character recognition algorithms have problems to accurately read these documents due to their noisy nature. Therefore we were looking for some ways to improve these unsatisfactory results. Our approach is based on fully-convolutional neural network inspired by U-Net architecture. We are utilizing a synthetic image generator for obtaining a training set for our method. We reached 99.53% recognition accuracy for synthetic data. For real data, we are providing qualitative results.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, project No. DG16P02B048. Access to computing and storage facilities owned by parties and projects contributing to the National Grid Infrastructure MetaCentrum provided under the programme “Projects of Large Research, Development, and Innovations Infrastructures” (CESNET LM2015042), is greatly appreciated.

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Correspondence to Ivan Gruber .

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Gruber, I., Hlaváč, M., Hrúz, M., Železný, M. (2019). Semantic Segmentation of Historical Documents via Fully-Convolutional Neural Network. In: Salah, A., Karpov, A., Potapova, R. (eds) Speech and Computer. SPECOM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11658. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26061-3_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26061-3_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-26060-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-26061-3

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